Cardinal Numbers: Stories Read online

  He looks at her, breathing carefully. Did she sleep in all that makeup or just put it on?

  They sit on the porch drinking Cokes. Her long legs are stretched out across the railing. The air is still.

  “Your problem is you look at home anyplace because nothing stands out.” She says this solicitously, as though he might see a doctor about it. “It’s like the day I knew we were going to split was when Nina and me did those wrestling pictures. You remember? I go, ‘Well, he might want to do something after, with both of us.’ Not like I wanted you to, though probably it would’ve been okay. But naturally, you wouldn’t even think of it. No curiosity.”

  “It was an assignment for work.”

  Her eyes are closed; she’s not listening. Riley could shake up the Coke with his thumb over the hole and …

  A man across the street is getting set to clip his hedge. First he goes inside with the long orange cord so he can plug in. Two little girls scream in the spray of a hose, taking turns. Somebody ordered a cab; the driver honks, honks, but no one comes.

  She says: “Go down and get some rye bread, I’ll make sandwiches.” Her eyes are still closed.

  Riley’s legs are so tired that it’s a joy to pedal. The store is cool and empty. He gets a Slurpee, and bubble gum packaged like chewing tobacco. Magazines are every which way in the rack. Hit Paraders and Playgirls and Omnis and Motor Trends and Cavaliers and one sun-faded Global Detective from last June. “Artist Model Drowns in Punchbowl,” one of his favorites. He goes out into the sun and sits on the curb to read.

  PHOSPHATES

  CONLAN BOUNCED IN THE Ford and his fresh cigarette rolled under the pedals. He tried to stamp out the coal and lurched. How could the road be so muddy and still bounce him? Conlan was no scientist, that he’d grant. Breath plumed out of his mouth, made a milky blue patch on the windshield. His tongue was dry. It wanted to taste raspberry.

  “Mutual trust,” Mr. Tunbridge said every September. “That’s what makes the stars come out.”

  And then he gave Conlan something in advance.

  “MULLED cider, cocoa, herb teas,” the brother said in answer to the question of how he could keep his soda fountain open through the winter.

  Conlan looked up and down the street, which had only two summers ago been paved. “Herb teas,” he repeated. “You’re dreaming.”

  “People need a wholesome place to come,” the brother said. “After the sleigh ride, after the skaters’ party. And the community sing. That’s every week.”

  “You’re a bloody public servant now?” Conlan spat with finesse. “You’ll put bloody marshmallows in the cocoa, and no extra charge.”

  The brother was waiting for the Syracuse truck that brought him gassed water.

  “And what would you have me do, then? Go out on the lake with you and fish through the ice?”

  “Nah, you’d find a way to drown.”

  Conlan felt his nose going red in the sun. The street was giving up vapors.

  EVERYTHING was bare, except for the oaks, always the last to let go. The birches were right without leaves, their black limbs striping the white sky, their white paper bark mottled black. Conlan viewed uncreased gray water through them, the lake, Racquet Lake, which the Tunbridges could have named after themselves, but hadn’t, which they owned in some different way than their ore mountains and smelters and ships. More intimately, more seriously. Conlan went into the boathouse. He looked at the racked canoes, smelled varnish. His palms felt cold; his fingers tingled and twitched as if he had just held someone under, fatally.

  FOR a living, the brother had cut wood and shot quail and hung windows and so on. People in the town liked his thrift. Then he wooed and won Miss Loretta Frame, who had served eight years as governess to the younger Tunbridge children, and they liked his sand. The brother had foresight, and was not ashamed. His fountain had a veined marble counter, checkered floor tiles, filigreed taps and faucets, an etched blue mirror, and in their season, fresh flowers at every table. Father Voss, the Lutheran, who liked a tulip sundae, said the brother’s place was so comfortable it made him think about retirement. The brother had to have new dentures, he smiled so much. Conlan wasn’t exactly jealous; but he was irritated. It was weak to take the money. He told Loretta the children wept whenever her name was mentioned.

  THE Tunbridge family carried history the way soda carried the colors of syrup. They knew things by instinct.

  Riker, the in-law whose cups of tea were always laced, lectured on eugenics at Cornell. While the rest of the family was under sail, racing one another from cove to cove, Riker stayed uncoaxable in shade, painting the wicker.

  “I read in this morning’s paper,” he said, “of Mrs. Elise Winch of Oneida being bitten by an owl. She was only thirty-four.”

  Inside the house, in the hexagonal library on the third floor, where planets were painted in color on the ceiling, the skull of Garrison Tunbridge, Sr., who found copper in Wyoming and guano in Peru, was displayed under glass.

  “One must expand or go mad,” said Auntie Vera, who could dance in Italian.

  Conlan imagined the nests of hair under her arms.

  THUNDER rolled away across the northern scarp. Hat brims dripped and shingles glistened. Inside the rain-battered cups of columbine and tiger lily, bees died of exhaustion.

  “Lemon phosphate.”

  “Cherry phosphate.”

  The twins exchanged looks in the blue mirror. Their faces were as identical as their coifs, bicycles, leg-of-mutton sleeves.

  “With ice, please,” they said.

  The temperature swing brought on by the storm made the brother ill. His skin was clammy and he trembled. With disagreeable vividness came recollection of the home left near forty years ago, tea and treacle by a peat fire.

  “And extra straws.”

  The matched white faces looming, dead white under freckles.

  AS Conlan swept the porch, he heard stones click in the lapping water. The lake at its deepest was said to be twelve hundred feet. It was terribly cold there and all the fish were blind. The music room and parlor, as Conlan peered through the windows, seemed deep in that forbidding way. He shivered, imagining the piano keys’ slick cold like some ancient ice unpleasantly preserved. Red-brown geometries floated up. He turned away, mouth curling around the taste of foreign carpet.

  LORETTA said, “This is the weekend I go to New York.”

  The brother understood about interest on a loan.

  “I’ll need new pajamas,” he said.

  He took his wife to the station with an hour to spare. Alone on the platform, they watched and were watched by a murder of crows.

  “Your brother,” Loretta began.

  Desperately inspired, her husband emptied his pockets of change, fell on his knees to retrieve it, and she pointed out coins with the triangular toe of her boot.

  “Phone me tonight,” he said.

  She smiled from the compartment window, pretending not to hear, subtle as tailings.

  “HELP yourself, Conlan,” said G.T., Jr.

  The squash were enormous, the cucumbers ready to explode. Tunbridge, in pressed green overalls and striped engineer’s hat, enhanced a proprietary gleam. He was proud of the family fertilizer, a secret blend. Knowing the invitation as otherwise meant—he was free to take, but invisibly, please—Conlan still bit a tomato, inhaling seed clumps like frog eggs, only warm. Tunbridge caught the gesture, but maintained his gleam, sharpened it.

  “We used to call them love apples,” he said. “A member of the nightshade family.”

  OBSESSIVELY, the brother thought about sherbet. He stared out the bay window, past his backwards name in gold paint shaded with black. The street stayed empty, the main street without a policeman to patrol it. Azalea sherbet? Rosemary? Mushroom? French monks had recipes, and sultans did. Knowledge was money, history was money, and so on. The brother wiped the marble counter until he could see himself wiping. The veins in the marble, unlike the veins in the body, wer
e confused and led nowhere. Blue veins in orderly fashion shipped blood the color of sherbet, an essence. If fact was fact and the street was empty, why not a supernatural sherbet? One that removed the power of speech and made music.

  IT felt safest to enter by the kitchen. The Ford refused to turn over in the falling chill, and now Conlan was inside the house, drawn to white surfaces—cupboards, stove, and sink—which made the most of last light. But he heard things like dance steps on the lake and voices from under the carpet. Conlan had always understood the way of being alone, and to lose that would leave him with nothing. When he stole something from the house last summer, it had been a little picture book that no one would miss; it had been a gesture for himself alone. Pictures had nothing behind them, were only themselves. We would miss you, Conlan. He began searching every drawer for candles.

  MUNICIPAL NOIR

  MADRID, IN NEBRASKA’S SOUTHWEST corner, in the wide terraced plain below the Platte, had a Hog & Hominy Fest annually until 1978. There are three taverns in the town, two hardware stores, a Boys’ Club, a pistol range, and Strunk Fabrication, where crèche figures and baptismal fonts are made by a system of injection molding.

  IN August of 1977, Ron Maddox was planning a future there. He had come to his wife’s country from North Dakota. Ron’s Pythagoras ABM Silo Group Commander, Lieutenant Benkelman, had been the best man at the wedding in Minot. Bonnie was expecting a child, but she wasn’t pregnant yet.

  IT was only the fact of having once received a Visible Man anatomy doll for Christmas that prepared Kallinger for what he was to find all over the kitchen of Unit No. 6 at the mobile home park just off the county blacktop midway between Madrid and La Paz. Interim Coroner Perk Feed had so little to work with that even a preliminary finding seemed unlikely. Feed’s right leg was some two and one quarter inches shorter than his left, due to a fraternity initiation.

  WAS Fran the kind of woman who would go all the way to Yankton for bridgework? Why had Lute Strunk rotated his best acres into sorghum? His CB handle was “Fledermaus,” and some said he had peculiar ideas about Jews.

  AT 9:15 a.m. on Friday, Miss Clara Musil reported that her collection of little glass animals had been vandalized by a one-armed man. The light-blue hatchback had been abandoned next to the Elks Hall. Both Reverend and Mrs. LaFollette were treated for hyperventilation.

  KALLINGER, at the subsequent awards dinner, wearing a strap-in-the-back “Go ’Huskers” baseball cap, refused to eat his portion of tapioca pudding until someone had tasted it first, and later proposed a curious toast “to Negro banking interests.”

  “HE wanted the best of both worlds,” said a bureau insider.

  Donna, Benkelman’s estranged wife, disagrees. Living in San Diego now, she has legally adopted Fran’s two sons and works as a commercial illustrator.

  “Gas spectrometry is fine. Fiber analysis is fine. But people want a good, human story, and in this case they didn’t get it.”

  SUSPICION of multiple sodomy focused on a “drifter” with a history of bronchiectasis. Someone had caused Jud Musil’s feed troughs to be infected with hog cholera. These were theories congruent with mutual distrust.

  “We lacked a fallback position,” one resident later observed. “Pictures just didn’t tell the story.”

  AND then on a crisp October morning, during the final hour of Ingo Feed’s Stop & Swap radio show, a strangely insistent man phoned in to offer his entire collection of bat-wing fans in exchange for “the global freezing design.”

  BY now people were beginning to ask hard questions about the investigative reporter in their midst. Complicitous terrorist supplying atrocity photos to clients in Melbourne, Rome, Pernambuco, and Dubai? Semiliterate impostor becalmed in a delusional world of Mod Squad reruns?

  OVER treacherous, ice-glazed roads, normally temperate, circumspect farm families drove the forty-five miles to Arbeiter Mall so they could dine at a Polynesian restaurant. Owner Gus Triandos would boast once too often about his acquaintance with high-level research. The baby back ribs were moist, tender, imaginatively sauced.

  TRIAL proceedings, convened at the county seat of Bogota, began the first week of the new year under the guidance of Judge Pangloss LaFollette, no relation.

  Dr. Shah, for the prosecution, explained that, as an “outsider,” he’d had little success in convincing the authorities, even in the face of corroborative evidence from a degreed caseworker, that the dozens of cigarette burns on the chest were cause for alarm. Dr. Zweig, for the defense, described Ron as “a man without qualities.” Fran, according to the testimony of a Chicago psychic, was operating a barge on the Loire.

  “QUITE simply, there are no words to describe what Mrs. Maddox has already paid in suffering,” said a friend of the family.

  BONNIE appeared each day in the same oyster-gray ensemble, occupied the same front-row seat. Her only change of expression, a slight moue disarranging normally serene features, came as a result of Kallinger’s breakdown on the stand, his admission that “I never learned to hit the curveball.”

  THE jury, perhaps overly sequestered, imposed its inability to reach a verdict.

  FRYED CUTLETS

  by

  Rico V. Poons

  [BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: RICO V. Poons (born Abe Attel) was a member of the New York State Legislature, for Ulster County, from 1948 until 1955. In November of that latter year, he told companions at a Slide Mountain hunting camp to “deal me out while I go write in the snow.” He was never seen again.

  Poons’ only other published work, “The Otter That Swam in the Soup,” appeared, in two parts, in the fortnightly Lads’ Gazette for June 23rd and July 8th, 1917, at which time the author was eleven years old.]

  HERE IS THE CLUB Onyx, at the same location thru two World Wars. The house band has a contract with Decca. The complementary matchbooks were designed by a cousin of Reginald Marsh.

  HERE is Snuffy Howe, of the Bar Harbor Howes, the all-Ivy wressler with pins in both knees, a Stage Door Johnny with a heavy portfolio.

  WHILE studying at Brown, Snuffy took employment with the Mastic Gum Co. of Providence. For them he composed a series of Trading Cards titled “Cameos Of American Conversation.” He still carries a specimen in his wallet, #18 in a series of 50.

  The Blizzard Of ’88 … Only two men had ventured thru the driving snow and wind to partake of their customerry noon repast at The Murray Hill Chop House. These stanch men, Scanlon, a hotelier, and Shapiro, a tunesmith, sat in complete silence until the fowl was served, Capon With Currant Sauce.

  Shapiro: Nothing goes straight to the heart like good food.

  Scanlon: I never met a man to say no.

  Shapiro: Not for all the rice in China.

  HERE is Dodie at the hatcheck stand, singing to herself about honeysuckle vines and tall sugar pines. She walks to work 37 blocks from her flat on Terpsichore Street. There her drapes are festive with donkeys and watermelons embroydered on. She has a closetful of shoes. Dodie collects footwear of all kinds. And who doesn’t tell she looks like Betty Hutton—everybody’s Jitterbugging Daughter, ooo yess, and the girl who made the Miracle At Morgan’s Creek.

  HERE is the band at a long table in the Onyx kitchen. They are eating elk wieners and kraut, drinking ale. Guido (C-Melody Sax) says he is the only person to ever go broke on Florida Real Estate. A kid making roux for the Gumbo burns himself bad.

  ONLY one customer at the bar, Chick Lazslo, the City Hall Reporter. He’s been snooping for scandle all day, and no luck. He’s drinking rock-and-rye doubles, and pretending to be in Afrika. Over the backbar there’s a desert landscape, lozenge shapes and minarets under a red sun, basic-ly. Like the artist got swacked on a carton of Camels.

  HERE’S this gnarly Cop poking his nitestick into the big man sleeping on a bench at the RR station. The big man rubs his black face and sits up. His clawhammer coat is torn and his shoes are somewhere else. He rubs his great low-thumbed meathooks together and smiles. This is Snuffy Howe, the Bar Harbor sci
on and range pistol champ. Snuffy Howe is a Gorilla.

  JANUARY, ’26, and the Turley Howes are returned from their Afrikan rubber plantation to the castle overlooking the textile mills on the river. It has been snowing furtively for days, and it looks like Connecticut or Michigan or Pennsylvania from the window of a bus. Dr. Livesy, a GP of the very first water, sexologist, fly fisherman, and Ambassador-To-Be, wears his pince-nez on a ribbon. He calls for boiling vinegar and arranges instruments on a tray, chaynsmoking as he works. After the long delivery, they read the papers and don’t say a thing. Mrs. Howe stops crying and hangs herself.

  HERE is the hexagonal brass check Snuffy receives in exchange for his Borsalino. Dodie looks into his sunken black eyes. He tells her they could be First in History to be married underwater. How’s about Chesapeake Bay? Dodie says, well, anyway, you look durable enough. And the way she says it is so offhand, like she’s home frying up some cutlets and a little cigarette ash falls in the pan.

  BETWEEN sets Doghouse Riley (Bass Fiddle) creeps into the pantry to glom some reefer. The only thing he can smell is sacked onions. Doghouse is thinking with his voice he ought to throw over this nowhere gig and move into radio. He experiments with some intros: From the Fabulous Assagai Room … Vulcan Tire Radio Breaks in With the News!

  RIGHT behind him, between the onions and the wall, Dodie’s satin heels are hooked over the furred Howe shoulders on which the future of a Dynasty rests. She says in his ear: I’ve never had anybody like you. And no Sweet Talk here, but a matter of fact. Like she’s telling her butcher to trim off the fat.

  HERE is the enormous Solaryum of Marmalade Hospital, an aroma of moss, a canopy of fronds. Dr. Livesy, still sharp in his 90’s (he is allowed to treat himself), arrives for an interview with Mr. Lazslo of The Bugle. Absolutely, son, always a head for figures. Could have been Mr. Memory in the Vaudeville. Reciting imagined names and addresses, false bank account numbers, he rolls the gift cigar between acid-scarred fingers.