7.2 Back in Pittsburg

Back in Pittsburgh, when quiet found Jeff and settled around whatever space he might occupy, he often failed to take any notice.  His head would remain full of murmurings like shifting corn before harvest.  But he never confused internal murmurings with external sound.  At work, where small voices floated corridors between office cubicles, he moved toward and away from those met with “Hey-Ya!  Still on for lunch Thursday?” or “Red’s your best color, Flea, and here I thought it was Blue!”  Blondes floated out of aisles as if waters parted by Moses when Jeff breezed through departments.  He saw everything, everyone, all facets, all sides.  Rumor said: Jeff Harrison, Harry to many, was “connected” with City Fathers.  When he smiled deftly and shook hands deftly, a “sureness” accompanied every action.  The “rumor” pleased him.  He had made himself utterly indispensable in more areas and departments than any single other person associated with Public Works.  Life was a rolling ball and Jeff was the one who rolled it. 

            Jeff’s landlady, Eva Garden, is wide and swarthy with forearms like hams and shoulders like the rolled back of a Chesterfield chair.  Though never exposed to his view, he is keenly aware of the fat dimples like upholstery tufts hidden under her shirts and day dresses.  The Harrison women, aunts and grandmothers on his father’s side, they were bulked up and dimple-tufted in just such a way.  Oh, yes.  Jeff was keenly aware of what jiggled all hidden behind buttons and nonsense.

            Not that Jeff wasn’t attracted to wide-spanned women.  The bakery owner where he stopped every morning, most mornings at any rate, was wide-beamed and, quite frankly, to his way of thinking, perfection.  Where flirting with hordes of office girls and women cost Jeff “Harry” Harrison not a thing, the mere idea of tossing out the flummery of idle crap to “Rhonda” cost him dearly.  She, oh, it’s too cliche to begin to even think let alone form into voiced, verbalized words, but she took his breath away, Rhonda did.

            Other women, by contrast, gave nothing, no semblance of “true life.”  They were failed recipes for what might have been yummy.  They were more often predictably even less than that, lacking dimension, barely scribbled upon 3 x 5 cards, seldom fingered and never made. 

            Mrs. Garden was a young widow, forty-ish.  Her obsession was baking, not just for herself and not just for Mr. Jeffrey Harrison who lived diagonally across the hall, but for eight out of ten of the occupied apartments in the building, plus neighbors in adjoining buildings and buildings across the street.  There were blonde brownies that she made and fudge brownies and nut breads with banana or zucchini or pumpkin.  She did not make scones or muffins that Jeff was aware of.  All baked goods she made and left for him were wrapped in clear plastic wrap and usually had a ribbon or piece of raffia tied around double like gifts.  What the brownies or breads tasted like was an unknown and he came up with clever lies when she asked how he liked them, which was often.  When he told Mrs. Garden how good her baked items had been, his smile was genuine, sincere because he was truly grateful for each item, every one stored on his cupboard shelves.             He stood with both cupboard doors open, let his eyes travel up all the clear plastic wrap on the various sized packages.  From the middle shelf he pulled down a mini-loaf of pecan-pumpkin bread and placed it on the counter.  From a drawer he withdrew a roll of Saran Wrap and measured out a length he tore off for rewrapping the bread.  Then he centered the embroidered label, the one so often fingered these last few days, on the plastic wrap and placed the already wrapped pecan-pumpkin bread over it.  He brought up each side and smoothed it free of wrinkles, then retied the ribbon he’d removed and replaced Eva Garden’s baked gift on the middle shelf.  The contents of his shelves were in perfect order.  The sheen on the door exteriors showed no smudges on the cherry veneer.  Cherry wood’s extraordinary luster occupied his line of vision for several minutes after he closed the cupboard doors.  The hinges were hidden and the gloss of the wood was uninterrupted by handles or hardware of any kind, as if the cabinet designers had known he, Jeff Harrison, would occupy 3B and cut and fit accordingly. 

The street where the label came into his hands was already forgotten.  There’d been a jazz bar along the way, he remembered, and a lot of silence.  Small sounds and a lot of quiet, he recalled, but no street name.  That part was as gone as the name of the pony that failed place in a race he won money on. 

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7.1 Have You Seen The Muffin Man?

 Shortly after nine, Jeff Harrison climbed fourteen steep concrete steps to the street.  It was empty which seemed odd to Jeff at this hour of the evening.  It would not have been empty in Pittsburgh, not his street, the street his apartment was located on.  His landlady’s building but Jeff’s apartment, properly speaking.  His rent was paid eight months in advance.  It had been paid up a year in advance, but the ponies at Bay Meadows failed him a few times consecutively and that had left him not out in front so much as he would like to be.  He would catch back up; he could feel it in his stride.  Not his physical stride but his mental stride. 

             He stood quite at ease at the top of the stairs, breaths making small clouds about his head, looking left, looking right at his leisure.  He did turn his back on the street at one point, glanced down into the dark recesses where the steps disappeared completely.  Nothing moved in that dark, nothing breathed.  He unbuttoned leather gloves, slipped them off and into his winter coat pockets (a long coat made of a rich charcoal wool, alpaca, a coat that had cost him dearly but one that the ponies, having been especially reliable for several meets running, had afforded him).  He slipped his bare hands down into the pockets as well.  In the left pocket, Jeff fingered the label, the sleek threads of embroidery on the patch of silk.  Shrugging his coat up, he resumed facing out on the street, stepped off the curb, crossed over, and headed north; he thought himself about eight blocks from his hotel and set off.

              About the street he was on – by morning, Jeff would not recollect the name.  They were all very much the same, common and forgettable, swathes of asphalt between high buildings, block after block after block of the same.  This one had been cleaner; hardly any rubbish at all.  Come to think of it, none.  Not even a styrofoam cup.  If a cup scuds and rolls on an empty side street in the general vicinity of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, New York, and no one hears when it topples along the curb, no one witnesses its journey – was the cup ever really there?  People thought of things in the most bizarre ways, like trees falling in unoccupied forests, why shouldn’t Jeff ponder rubbish? More specifically, cups?  Absent cups, that is.  His shoes on the asphalt and then on the concrete walk made a noise, of course they did, with each step.  He anticipated the sound of hard leather on the ground surfaces before they briefly occurred and each step was more like an echo of one that hadn’t yet happened or one that had passed and already been replaced by quiet.  For no reason other than ceasing the sounds associated with his own steps, he stopped.  His toes in the lamplight were shiny and brown just as shiny brown dress shoes should be at all times; his trouser legs were a soft cocoa color, an ill match with his long coat, but he had needed the long coat tonight and, besides, perfect fashion had never been, would never be, his forte.  He hadn’t walked far, less than two blocks, before slowing to stop, examine the absence of sound.  As a result, other noises became apparent.  Before pausing, it was as if his ears had taken on the focusing aspect of eyes and created their own sort of tunnel vision, concentrating with minute attention on asphalt to concrete contacts his feet made.  Music lolled sticky beats near the lamppost just ahead.

            Someone had left the narrow jazz bar, let the static of snare drums and hum of a sax do a groping turn out on the sidewalk before the door pulled shut.  There was a wheeze about the door as it closed.  Then bass thumps from inside were more felt than heard by the passerby outside.  Jeff fingered the label inside his pocket.  He would not go back inside, not revisit the scene of the crime.  The true crime.  Her crime.  Shame on her.  “Shame on you.”  There.  He had said it out loud.  “Shame. On. You.” And there, again, each word enunciated with the same slide and hiss as his hard leather soles on asphalt, on concrete.  Brief.  Hardly there.  Crushing.

            The sharp comparisons came then, the comparisons of sounds made at the bottoms of stairwells, how a neck snaps inside the muffled wrappings of a cashmere scarf in November.  What the walls of the stairwell absorb.  How a stairwell is so very porous when compared to the metal, glass, plastic interiors of a parked car on a high desert road. Without ears to hear these ends to beginnings, the romantic lies can’t thrive, can’t grow.  Shame on them.  All of them.  He would not go back inside.  He had blocks to go before reaching his hotel and a conference to attend first thing and early tomorrow.  He had enough music in the contemplation of brown leather sounds, in the feel of a newly acquired label torn from the collar of a used up blouse. 

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1.4 Cher and the Acropolis . . . talking with Grace

Cher looked out the window on the Acropolis, indistinct as a phantom.  How did it happen?  Within two minutes she was sated, full, done, when for hours and days, well, two days, she had wanted nothing more than conversation with family.  And now.  “I’m sorry, Mom.”  Cher wasn’t, but she sounded contrite in a Star Trek Spock-ian way.

             “We haven’t heard a word from Sunny all week.  We do, normally, hear something, a message left or something.”

            Is this going to be something for me to worry about, Cher thought.  Worry about Cher was the object of desire; to have those she cared about concerned for her wellbeing.  Not the reverse.  Not the concern she began feeling for Sunny.  “A boyfriend, maybe?”

            “Has she mentioned a new man to you, Cher?  She hasn’t to me.  But, then, she doesn’t.  Not like she would to a sister, to you.”

            “No.  But I’m here, Mom, and have been for the best part of four months.  We haven’t talked except maybe twice.  Not at all this month.”  Cher admitted to herself but not to her mom that that was different, not right, not Sunny-ish at all.

            “Will you be home for Thanksgiving?”  And just like that the Sunny concern was ended and over and also forgotten.  Anyone who knew Sunny knew she had too much common sense to run off with a guy; Sunny was practical. 

            “Mom, I don’t think I can travel with this brace.”

            “Nonsense.  You can walk can’t you?”

            “Yes. With a walker or a cane.”

            The pause on the line is unlike her mother.  “Mom?”

            “You use a walker?  Cher, I didn’t know.”

            “It’s the neck that got tweaked, Mom, but the rest of me is, well, a little off, unbalanced – it’ll go away.  Just needs time.”

            “Should we come there then?  Your dad and I?”

            “Oh you guys can’t come here!  Are you nuts, Mom?”  And Cher knew, felt very sure at any rate, her parents would not fly to Greece for Thanksgiving.  Did they even raise Turkeys in Greece for consumption?  The suggestion however, gave Cher little tremors from shoulder to shoulder, vibrated her heart just a smidge – it was the exact sort of concern she had wanted these many days (three).

            “Maybe we can’t; maybe we can.  You don’t get to call all the shots, Cher.”  She didn’t respond with Since when do I get to call any shots; name one; I dare you.   In the end, her mother would talk with her father and they would make the decision to stay home or fly to Athens; they would, additionally, see if Sunny could swing the time off to come with them, make it a real family holiday for all the Lindegarde’s.

            When the phone receiver was taken from Cher’s hand, she didn’t wake up.  They had said good-byes, and although Cher wouldn’t remember that part, she would recall how the smog seemed to part, not part exactly, but thin, thin itself out so that scaffolds and construction equipment on The Acropolis came into view, hazy, but recognizable.   

            The phone was removed by Alexa, the citizen of Greece, the Athenian Child of Fairness for the Underdog to Cher’s way of thinking, the Teen Seer who would have Cher pay for the mule/donkey/ass/burro/poor dumb animal that someone, some other Greek bricked to death.  Why had that been done?  Couldn’t the broken leg or legs have been fixed?  Didn’t they have vets in this country?  Thank all the gods she wasn’t four-legged, Cher had thought more than once – her broken neck would’ve gotten her bricked. 

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1.3 Cher’s World . . . Early Hospital Days

Of the Greeks who ventured into and out of Cher’s world in those early hospital days, Cher found Alexa the most interesting. 

            “Are you Athenian?  Were you born here, in the city?”

            “No.  Why?”

            “Because.” Cher sorted around for why she might ask, why any answer might matter.  She didn’t think she had a truly good cause to ask, but said “Because of Mr. Stamatos.”

            “Mr. Stamatos?”

            “Yes.”

            “Why?”

            “Because you take up his cause.  Because you petition me on his behalf.”  Through clamped jaws Cher added, Every damned day, but it was unintelligible, three grunts, little more than that. 

            “Does your head ache?  Do you need more pain?”

            “Yes, a little.  And no, no more pain please.  Another pill, perhaps?” 

            On some days when Anastas comes into her room his great gray-green eyes pass over her as if she were a sheet, a white sheet, and as they pass they reconcile some unspoken question with an answer: no wrinkles, no need to touch, no need to fuss with this piece of linen today.  On other days, she is not simple linen but Egyptian cotton of the finest and highest thread-count and his hands cannot bear but run themselves over all of her inches, smoothing, pressing the non-existent flaws just for the feel of . . . of the sheets.

            Cher has no job; obtaining her Master of Fine Arts degree would be her job once the new term began.  And after?  Research.  She wanted to do Research of some sort, something in the field of Art of course but Research.  The effects of Art on Life; the effects on humanity when Art is absent, people deprived.  The sensory effects of life on art, art on life . . . The art of Egyptian Linens and how sheets should be touched.

            She supposed she had a lot of the same personality traits as Sunny; Cher just lived wider.  Sunny lived narrow.  Sunny had a job and career even before her MBA.  Focus.  A light-bulb moment for Cher. Focus! That was the key element in Sunny of which Cher seemed to own less.  She would’ve bobbled her head, acknowledging this breakthrough in thinking regarding her own life and Sunny’s, but the halo brace factored out head bobbing and wags and self-body talk that Cher was and had always been much given toward.

           

Cher was staring at a view of nothing out the window beside her hospital bed.  The Acropolis was out there on its hill.  Or was it the hill that was the Acropolis.  Either way, it was out there, Cher just couldn’t see it.  On a clear day, maybe, but air quality in Athens stunk, so she was staring at variations on a yellow-brown atmosphere when Anastas brought her a phone and plugged it in next to her bed.

            “You must think us the most completely awful parents in the universe,” Grace Lindegarde said.

            “You’re right.  But let’s not talk about that now, Mom.”

            “But can’t I say how badly we feel?  It’s not like the other times, is it?  You’re not a few states over at that college -”

            For some reason Cher did not jump in with “M.I.T.” to fill in the name of the college for Grace.  There was something pathetic about her mother’s memory.  “No, I’m not there; this isn’t like those times.”

            “M.I.A.  I never understood why you picked that one,” she said but her voice came around the world as if Grace had moved the receiver away from her mouth, had the mouthpiece pressed to her throat or otherwise blocked so that the miles, the distance became more real than a phone conversation normally seemed to Cher.  Normally, to Cher, no matter where she might be, the people she spoke with seemed within arm’s reach.  Almost. 

            “I wonder,” Cher said.  “what possessed me?”

            “Is that sass I read in your voice?  I apologize and I get backtalk?”

            “You apologized?”

            “Of course.  Well.  I would.  You said not to speak of it now.”

            “Then let’s not.

            “Your father’s here.  Shall I put him on?”  Cher sorted around in her scrapbook mind for just how “here” her father might be in proximity to her mother and what she came up with was through the kitchen, the laundry room, out the back door and down three steps to the garage where, against the far wall a long workbench existed and a stone-cutting saw with a high stool out in front and her father, Paul Lindegarde, just there, bent forward, goggled up with safety glasses, iPod earphones filling his head with Creedance Clearwater Rival, Van Morrison, The Steve Miller Band . . .

            “Maybe.  After a while.  What do you hear from Sunny?”

            “Not a word.  Not a peep.”

            “She doesn’t know I’m, she doesn’t know what’s happened, that I’m still here, in Greece?”

            “You know she doesn’t call much from the road,” she answered too quickly.  Too defensively. 

            “Oh, and like I do?”  For an instant, the sarcasm stuck in Cher’s throat like a furball; she fairly spit the words when they came and did not feel better for her ungrateful ways. 

            “Now it’s your turn,” Grace said.  A crisp clarity shot through the phone lines.  “Try to be thoughtful, child.  Try to be nice.  Imagine I’ve earned that same respect you might give to a stranger on a bus.  If you will.” 

            “Mom,” Cher said.

            “Oh, come on,” Grace said.  “Try.”

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8.1 Cher got off a plane at O’Hare

Ten weeks to the day from her near hanging death on a Santorini cliff, Cher got off a plane at O’Hare.  It was Christmas Eve, 2008.  She was halo-free.  Hallelujah! she was halo-free!  She was also sister-free, but this old bad thought didn’t stir in that moment.  That would come later when the taxi crawled down the lit street and slowed in front of the house where they built snowdogs when they were girls.  Then it would lumber up, some massive beast, so heavy her head would bobble on her tender neck before she got control, whipped the great mass of grief back down and take one next step, and the next. 

What came now was the first biting wind assaulting a narrow strip of her face still exposed between pulled down hat and pulled up cashmere scarf.   The open-skin strip was no more than what Geordie La Forge’s VISOR would hide, but in that half minute it took for the taxi doors to get opened and her luggage thrown in the back, Cher would’ve welcomed just such a device to shield her eyes.  They felt like frozen grapes, her eyeballs did, just that fast.

She gave the driver her parent’s address.  He said, “Settle back, we’ve got some traffic problems in two directions but I’ll try to work out a way -”

“Take your time.”  How odd this might seem to the driver never entered her head.  She dreaded the turn onto their block.  The feel of pale carrot colored bricks and the mortar connecting them underfoot.  The radiating half-moon steps up to the verandah.  Their initials frozen in a mortar track on the far left. The foyer.  The landing.  Christmas Eve.  The past.  How she and Sunny spied, neither girl ever fooled by the myth of Jolly, at least not in their collective recollections, at least not ever admitted to. 

As the driver suggested, she settled back, and light in from the terminal signs lit up her lap, her hands, her lap, her hands, by turns with columnar shadows.  On her ring finger, right hand, there was a heavy, gold ring that hadn’t been there when she flew off to Greece.  She did not want to think about that now, either.  Cher did not want to think about anything.  Nothing would be good.  Nothing would be very good.  She slid the ring off, dropped it inside her deep coat pocket, put her glove back on.  Anastas would not be pleased about his gold shifting from left hand to right and right hand to pocket – or, maybe he wouldn’t care.  Cher hardly knew him enough to tell.  And did not want to think about that.  Did not.  And consequently, didn’t.

 ~

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6.1 Joe and the Abandoned Car

Joe Markelson was happy the morning he found the abandoned car.  He was fifty-five and damned pleased with himself for being alive.  On January 4, 1971, President Nixon had announced “The end is in sight” and Joe had tripped a booby-trapped landmine that left bits of his leg dripping off wide jungle leaves.  The Markelson’s were a family brought up knowing downsides had their ups; Joe’s “up” in Vietnam was the blast didn’t take his life (that goes without saying) or his knee.  The knee, Joe said, was a joint that ought be celebrated more frequently than it is – a joint deserving of odes, songs of high praise and such. 

             People could go a long time knowing Joe Markelson by sight, recognizing him as one of the Little League umpires squatted behind home plate calling balls and strikes springs and early summers, as the co-owner they handed their money to when buying gas or milk and a candy bar at the Gas-M-Up Lucky Mart and Convenience Store, as the patron reading Outdoor Life in the beautician’s chair over at Lorinda’s – people might recognize Joe in all sorts of ways and never know he’d lost a foot back in ‘71 until they saw him in swim trunks or shorts.   He didn’t own a pair of shorts beyond boxers and he only wore swim trunks when on fishing junkets down in Cabo, which is all to say despite the years Joe and Ted had lived in Alice, few knew what caused his all but indiscernible limp.

            Joe didn’t notice the Taurus on his way in with Ted.  Dust devils making columns between the road and the purple foothills kept grabbing Ted’s attention.  “There’s another one, look, toward Teensy Bit, wait, no, there’s two of them,” he’d say and Joe would look, his attentions momentarily dragged out to watch dirt rise up in funnels.  At one point they counted nine columns circling out there like skinny toy tops the color of cinnamon tossed down by childish gods.  “Out there” was the high desert – cold at night, not too bad in the day, even in October.  The “gods” were anybody’s guess: an Apollo in his terrible twos; an Athena on the cusp of womanhood, menstrual cramps putting her in a dust devil mood; a Hermes playing the trickster by dividing himself into so many possibilities no one could know who was true.  Who could say why the earth whorled up so frequently as it did between Alice and Teensy?  It just did.  And the Markelson boys made note of the number and Joe Markelson toyed with old myths while Ted kept a sharp eye, calling out “one there!” and “see! two more, just there.”

            The way a mind wanders with its imagination in tow explains Joe’s surprise to see the parked Taurus after dropping off Ted.  Was it there driving in?  Was it? He slowed.  There was no one behind him on the two-lane.  Hell, that was the puzzle of it all.  Coming in, there was no one behind them, no vehicles they passed.  Leaving, there was old Howard out in front of his store and a few cars parked at Tina’s but nobody else out and about.  So how did this white Taurus get where it was unless it was already there from the night?  Joe made a U and came back, pulled off behind the Ford, cut the engine, honked the horn – just once and briefly.  If someone was taking a snooze, better to wake them from a little distance, he thought, than be looming suddenly at their window.  He had about given his aunt Evelyn a heart attack once, when he came upon her napping in her car, in her driveway, and tapped at the window.  Not one fond of surprises, he did unto others in this regard and tried to warn when he approached, a little honk offered, as he did now; a whistled tune when he was afoot.  Hell, he’d been whistling anyway, happy, at fifty-five to be Stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive, umph-umph-umph, stayin’ a . . . but in whistle notes, of course.  He’d waited for a head to come up, look for the source of the honked horn, but none came after two brief honks with a pause in between.  Then he’d given three pretty fair blasts with no signs of life before he swung himself out of the pick-up and whistled his way up to the window.

            Morning sun hit the driver-side of the Taurus at an angle that made the window a mirror.  Not one where Joe could see his features so much but the line of his cap and the bill angled down over his collar showed.  He didn’t like that; it seemed smart-ass to present himself to anyone with his hat on back-asswards and he pulled the bill around front and smoothed the sides down above his ears as if the ballcap had sprung wrinkles somehow before ratcheting his knuckles on the glass.

            He knocked more than once, then put his face to the window, hands up like blinders to keep the sun out of the way.  This was not good, what Joe saw inside.  This was not good at all and he stopped, had already stopped two dozen words back, whistling stayin’ alive.   The woman inside was dead and he was two, maybe three, steps out from the side of the car, holding his knees and retching on the highway.  There was not going to be an upside to this, not for the woman in the white Ford Taurus, a rental car, as it turned out. 

~

Joe heard the racing wind cut by thorns.  He could, sometimes, hear that.  How the solid air made a long body of itself, forced itself over, under, around obstacles, and the thorns on mesquite shredded its tender flanks and underbelly, and the cacti stickers diced the flesh of the air even smaller, finer than the finest threads of spiders.  He wondered where the gods were then, all the little gods that played with men, pulled them up like columns of dirt, spat them out. 

Joe Markelson was a happy guy nine tenths of the time.  Death put him off happy.  And blood even further off.  The closest Joe came to killing and the result of killing was holding those Outdoor Life magazines.  He wasn’t that way before Vietnam.  Or, maybe he just hadn’t given over any thought to if he was or wasn’t that way, “that way” being adverse to killing. 

 The white county car pulled up and Joe’s cousin, Aunt Evelyn’s grandson, Keith Diamond, got out.  “You say there’s a body in there?” his head nodding toward the Taurus.  Joe nodded back.  “You touch anything?”  “I put my face to the window, my nose, I’d guess the heels of my hands.”  Keith watched Joe slide his fingers along the heel of one hand then the heel of the other, repeat the action more than a few times as if he was wiping off the splatter of glass where the window touched him, as if the blood spray on the inside had soaked through and gotten to him. 

Keith made some notes and said, “You got something on your hands, Joe?  You keep rubbing at them like -”  

“Nah.  Just the woolies, if you know what I mean.”  The “woolies” were what Aunt Evelyn called the shivery goose bumps that attended creepy things.  Joe knew Keith knew exactly what he was saying.

            “Any idea who it is?”

            “Only that it’s a woman.”  About then other county cars, all white, all relatively new, arrived.  Three, not counting Keith’s.  “You don’t need me around here, right?”

            “No.  Go on.  We know where to find you, you know where to find us, anything comes up.”

            “Well.  Then.  I’ll be heading off.  Don’t be missing that brochure in the back window there.  That might be where she spent the night.  Well . . . “  Joe didn’t remember the vomit on his shoes until he was back in his truck, one foot on the clutch the other one on the gas.  Then he remembered the last time he’d done that, back when he was a boy less than twenty, back when he had discovered Santos, his headless friend, back when not one of them would ever be young again.

~

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5.2 Sister Towns: Alice and Teensy Bit

Howard bought out Bob’s half of the section of land they’d made something out of out west. Bob made something out of the new acres he bought further west. By 1959, the flat lands around Howard’s and Alice’s had enough houses and roads and small farms that the Howard Hobbs’s expanded their little store with an upstairs and an elevator for folks who didn’t like stairs. They owned a piece of Lorrinda’s House of Beauty and the Mercantile Bank and pretty much every business in town, and the town was named Alice and had been named Alice from the minute it was a bona fide town.

Forty-two miles west, the hilly country around the Bob Hobbs’s was likewise blooming houses. Bob was the Postmaster there, six days a week sorting mail addressed to residents of Teensy Bit. (He’d dropped the extra “t” off his late wife’s maiden name to get the town council’s approval, according to what Alice told Howard.)

 To an outsider it would seem only logical that these towns, started up pretty much on the dollars In Trust the Bitt sisters inherited from Grandma Alice, should by all rights be named after those same sisters.

But to an insider, which Howard Hobbs was, the town namings came out of bitter love. And bitter love is a sad thing (even Joe Markelson knows this). There’s a promise inside it that twists up the best of what is. Some might even go so far as to say that the cause behind the Federal Highway System building the Interstate 63 miles due south of the two-lane road between Alice and Teensy Bit was a part of that twisted bad love.

Others, like the gossips in at Lorrinda’s, might attribute the by-passing of Alice and Teensy Bit to the fact that the governor’s brother-in-law owned a rock blasting outfit and 63 miles due south there was a good amount of rock to blast through to reach the other side of Bald Mountain.

The long and the short of it measured no more than this:  all the promise of the fifties and sixties and seventies withered away as surely as the grasslands did, as surely as Alice’s memory for words was withering daily, as surely as Teensy had withered down to even less than her little name suggested, till Bob had to feel through the bedspread to find her like a cord of old socks knotted and covered pretending to be his Teensy.

Alice, when she remembered to tell Howard about her sister’s last days, some thirty years back now, would go all soft, and, Howard, for all the years gone down in between, would go all hard just the same, remembering a field of green corn and his tender young wife going at it with his one-armed best cousin and friend from the war.  Of course, this is just the way Evelyn Merkelson reinvented the stories for her nephews, Joe and Ted.  She had been, after all, and according to her, Alice Hobbs’s dearest friend.

Alice died in 2006. Bob didn’t come to her services. But Howard came upon Bob later, near dark, sitting in the white plastic lawn chair Howard had left for himself at the edge of the new sod over Alice’s grave. He stood back for a long spell, not looking at Bob or the gravesite, but listening.  He was 83, Howard was, and his hearing wasn’t real keen, but he knew what a sob was.  After a minute or so,  he turned and left. Can’t make a thing gone sour anything other than what it is, he was overheard mumbling to his potatoes.

Then, and nobody heard this, he was thinking about Alice, and how, while she still remembered how to cook, how she used to make “Friendship Bread” off the clabbered milk starters Lorrinda or one of those other old gossips, like Evelyn, would share.  That’s what Howard was thinking when he left Bob to sob at his Alice’s grave. 

[word count 655]

5.1 Mr. Howard Hobbs

Mr. Howard Hobbs readied the storefront for opening:  shovels in line next to rakes and hoes; canning jars, seals and lids on the shelves just under the pectin and sugar, apples, the weak red and yellow kind, piled in baskets to haul outside to the porch.  Down the block, where the 25 mph sign slowed traffic a tad, the Markelson brothers arrived, Joe dropping off Ted, Ted hosing off gas pump lanes before he ever unlocks and goes inside, Joe leaned out the window, them talking and nodding about what only God knew, and not even God would care.  When Joe drove past on his way to wherever, he waved at Mr. Hobbs; one of those fingertips to the hat brim neighborly nods.  Mr. Hobbs never waved back at either one of those boys.  He had a basket of apples in hand, but he wouldn’t have waved.  Never did before.  Couldn’t see the need now. 

            Joe, the younger Markelson boy, honked and Mr. Hobbs told the apples “Yeah, I’d wear a hat too if I was as bald as all that.  No offense to you apples, but you’ve got more fuzz on your skins than that boy does.”  Ted and Joe Markelson had been running the Gas-M-Up Lucky Mart and Convenience Store since the day it opened in 1972, but that didn’t make them natives to this part of the country.  And it sure didn’t make them “men.” 

            This part of the country was Alice, population 204.  And Howard Hobbs had something to do with that, the town name, not the population.  When he thought about that, which he didn’t, he could partially see how all of his troubled days crawled out of that one sack of facts – no sons, no daughters, just hard work and Alice.  Any one of them (Alice, Howard, Bob, or Teensy) would set it up differently, the “it” being the “how” of the two sister towns, or the “why” of them.  The Markelson brothers heard it this way:

Alice and Teensy Bitt wed Howard and Bob Hobbs in late 1941.  Wars tend to make weddings come about faster than they might otherwise.  Bob had been seeing Teensy for a time.  She was pretty.  He was Navy.  She was a regular at the Canteen.  She had a sister.  He had a cousin . . . Howard.  All four said “I do” before a Justice of the Peace in Lincoln.  Getting married seemed the right thing.  War tends to decrease the amount of time spent considering such big steps in life.

Howard was Navy, too, and they, the cousins, shipped out of Long Beach, California, where the Bitt Sisters, now the Hobbs Sisters, waved them good-bye, together.    

The girls, before marriage, were the honey-haired “Bitt Sisters.” Alice, the younger, told Howard once about how she had mixed feelings-her name not being “Little” or “Tiny” or something clever like Teensy’s name was, but she was born in more serious times than Teensy.   Grandma Alice had died that same year, and Alice was what she got.

What Bob got over in the Pacific Theater was an empty sleeve and silver star.  Howard came home without a scratch or a medal but he was twitchier, less at ease, more impatient than the sailor Alice recalled.  Of course, they’d all been not much more than strangers who’d shared a dance floor more than once.  The men were still men, still cousins, still wed to sisters, and beyond ready to get on with making some good out of their lives. They headed west out of Lincoln.

 Now, the long and the short of it is just this: not five years down the road, the Hobbs’s had a falling out. Might’ve been bitterness on Bob’s part about his empty sleeve and Howard having two good arms and hands. Might’ve been Howard’s accidental stumbling upon Bob and Alice up to no good in the cornfield. But once the milk sours, it’s sour, and there’s no bringing it back to sweetness.

[more . . . ] 

[word count 655]

4.1 Space Empty: Pine Tree Motel, Room 111, Oasis, Oregon

Mr. Brown has a wife that never lifts a finger to help.  She hasn’t since 1972.  She was twenty-six.  She’d played right field for the church softball team.  They had a son, he was three weeks old, almost four.  Mr. Brown did not notice the baby was dead on the morning the baby was dead.  Mrs. Brown found him.  And when she did, she swaddled him tightly and ran in search of Mr. Brown.  Three rungs up from the asphalt, she stumbled on their apartment stairs, then the screams came, the first since she’d found her dead son.  Mr. Brown was being unfaithful at that moment.  At that time, still a relatively young man, he wasn’t all bad, just mostly.  And from inside the apartment where he had stopped being unfaithful but had not yet zipped up his pants, he decided against going out to help his wife with the baby.  He did not understand yet that his son was dead in his wife’s arms.  After the funeral, Mrs. Brown developed a limp and a lot of excess weight.  She stopped playing ball. She stopped going to church.  She stopped lifting a finger.

A hardware store employee, Mr. Brown, worked for his parents at the time.  The population was small and their business was small and Mr. Brown’s checks were small, but they got by.  They had no more children and that was a savings, and his folks, the elder Browns, passed on within thirteen months of each other.  It was in the hardware business he discovered the value of barter.  The physical exchange of goods and services.  A heavy-duty wheelbarrow for a roll in the hay.  A pitchfork for a blow-job.  Naturally, the superstores (Wal-Mart 30 miles east and K-Mart about twelve miles south) put him out of the hardware business.  Locals found Brown’s Hardware prices a little too high.  The Browns could not compete and decided to take what they could for the narrow storefront and sink it into a little motel.  The Pine Tree Motel.  Twenty-four rooms; twelve down and twelve up; plus living quarters with handicapped ramps and wide doors attached to the Office.  Mrs. Brown was by now in a wheelchair, her limp had not gone well with age and her excess weight had become more than merely unwieldy.  Mr. Brown in these times was far less successful with bartering attempts, but that did not deter his efforts.

The space in front of room 111 was empty.  One of his favorites had flown the coop and  it not even light yet outside.  What was she thinking?  The Gas-M-Up Lucky over in Teensy Bit wouldn’t be open for at least another hour; those Markelson brothers were not early risers.  Unlike Mr. Brown, who was.  There were things to be attended to that needed attentions early, when travelers were just stretching into wakefulness, finding their ways to the shower, undressing.  He was sorely disappointed that his favorite, Sunny Lindegarde, out of Lincoln, was off and gone so early.  For today, she would be the one that got away; for tomorrow, for tomorrow, well, he would just have to wait and see.  The peephole was there, through the wall from 110, and he would be there.  If it took earlier than today, so be it.  Mr. Brown would not miss her rising again.

[wordcount 547]

3.2 Sometimes He Thinks

Jeff Harrison does not gamble in Reno, which tells him that he is in control and does not have an addiction as his ex has described his proclivity for the ponies.  Of course, he already knows this, but he has, sometimes, not often, but sometimes felt the least bit of doubt in this regard.  It’s the nature of the animal, he tells himself, of the line and the heart, the poetry of motion in harness, how they move in their traces, how they respond to, to almost the suggestion of thought a driver might have in their handling.  It’s the sweat.  The smell of the sweat, the lather and drool after a race well run, the heart-pounding finish, regardless of where some filly may place.  He does not gamble in Reno, but takes long drives in a rental car after each day’s conferencing on the various aspects of nationwide Public Works facilities, driving far into the desert and night on one occasion, and over into the Sierra foothills and California on another occasion, driving all night and stopping in Susanville at a small bakery on his return trip to Reno.  The baker was small and Korean and the counter was fingerprinted all over with smudges from what had to be a week or a month’s worth of other people’s touching and taking and, although he purchased the bran muffin from the short man behind the counter, even shorter than he was, he did not eat it, nor did he drink the latte, but deposited them in the first trash bin, out of sight from the baker’s window.  And if he yawned through the meetings that day at the Hilton, he was pretty sure nobody noticed.

            At home again, he is pleased with himself, more so than he sometimes is and he takes the time on Tuesday morning to not only move the plastic-wrapped banana-nut or zucchini-nut or whatever-nut loaf from the hall outside his door to inside his apartment as he leaves, but he takes the small offering into his kitchen and makes a place for it inside his cupboard where two full shelves are stacked with small offerings.  Sometimes he thinks he will throw all the offerings away, but instead he buys a new trio of ant traps and places them on each of the three shelves-the two that are full and the one that he begins to fill, today.

[word count 400]