Dan (4 page)

“Safe!” snorted Melba’s mother. “What about Bret Glenn?”

“I don’t know about Bret Glenn,” said Melba.

“Of course you do,” said Melba’s mother, her voice vibrating from the exertion of maintaining the lunge. “Bret Glenn!” said Gigi Zuzzo. “He was repairing our television and rubbed his knees on the area rug one too many times. The static discharge made him jump so that he sent his head through the picture tube.”

“Did he die?” asked Melba.

“I should say so,” said Melba’s mother. “You don’t see Bret Glenn in town anymore!”

“What did he look like?” asked Melba. “Did he always wear an amulet?”

“No,” said Melba’s mother. “His hair brushed his collar, ever so lightly. Sometimes you almost thought it wasn’t quite reaching, there was no contact, but then, when you got closer, you could see it, you could hear it, Bret Glenn’s hair brushing his collar.” Her mother gripped Melba’s arm and steered her through the kitchen, so they could look down into the sunken room where her mother stored the exercise equipment.

“It happened right there,” said Melba’s mother, “by the Smith machine. He was so happy! He loved doing favors for friends. He didn’t just repair televisions! He dug the septic tank! Sometimes he drove you to elementary school, Melba. I’m surprised you don’t remember.”

“He didn’t die right there,” said Melba, uneasily. “Wouldn’t he have died somewhere else? In a hygienicized venue? The hospital in Henderson?”

“Dr. Buck was napping upstairs when it happened,” said Melba’s mother. “But by the time I got him showered and fed and properly awake, there was nothing Dr. Buck could do for Bret Glenn.”

“Dr. Buck! He’s been to our house!” Melba shrank back against the doorframe. Gigi Zuzzo looked at her with irritation.

“He’s been to everyone’s house,” she said. “He’s a doctor. Mayor Bunt made him keys. Sometimes he comes into the house in the night and tiptoes around, just to check on everyone.”

“You were telling me about Ann Dump,” Melba burst out, desperate to change the subject. “Why does Ann Dump want to lure the snails to the town hall?”

Gigi Zuzzo’s lower jaw jutted forward and she dropped into a furious squat.

“Addiction!” she sneered. Melba gasped. She had never joined the clusters of children licking snail and slug trails on the rubber tiles around the condemned Dan Mats & Flooring Emporium, and she had always doubted their reports of hallucinogenic experiences—red foxes playing bouzoukis and long beards growing at tremendous speeds on every face they saw—but she knew at least two of them, Em and Perry Blake, now lived behind the emporium in a hut and did nothing else.

“Ann Dump licks snails?” said Melba.

“Only nitwits lick snails!” snorted Melba’s mother. “That Ann Dump is no nitwit. It’s the toad she’s after. She’s infiltrated the reptile trading community with her boxes of snails. Every day, she sends the reptile trading community a fresh box of snails. One of these days, she thinks they’ll send her the toad. In the meantime, she doesn’t care how many snails run wild in the town hall, what they do to vital records. I’ve seen the records, Melba! It’s as if you don’t exist! There’s a hole where your name used to be! It’s like you’ve never been born!”

“That Ann Dump,” repeated Melba’s mother, but Melba suspected that the blame did not rest squarely on Ann Dump. The blame could not be conceived of as a regular polygon, contained and conventionally dimensional. The blame was a bigger, murkier object, with a drifty quality that frightened Melba. The blame hung in the sky over the valley. It was like humidity! Or a curse!

“In Dan, we all live in the shadow of blame,” said Melba to herself on her stool in the well-lit bakery. But shouldn’t her generation be blameless? Surely they hadn’t done anything wrong. And the next generation? The infants? What did Bev Hat’s infants have to do with the curse of Dan?

When Melba was a young child, far too young for high school, a group of women had disappeared from Dan. They were older women, old enough to bear some responsibility for Dan’s circumstances. Nonetheless, Melba had admired the women. She had enjoyed watching the women eat their meager lunches outside Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail.

In those days, Dan had several businesses in addition to the bakery, and a hosiery district. Mayor Bunt encouraged the production of fine hosiery through financial incentives to hosiers, and quite a few people in Dan had responded to the call. A great deal of hosiery was manufactured in Dan and stored in several warehouses, of which Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail was the largest. Unfortunately, the roads leading into and out of Dan were not stable enough to bear the weight of freighted trucks and it proved impossible to empty the warehouses, or, at least, to empty the warehouses profitably, delivering the goods to points of sale. The warehouses were emptied at a loss. Small barrel fires stoked by tube socks could be seen burning brightly in the hosiery district at night.

Melba was warned by her mother not to visit the hosiery district at night, although other children enjoyed the festive atmosphere and played complicated finger games with elastics cut from the big spools that overflowed the dumpsters.

“You’re not like the other children, Melba,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “You react poorly to elastics. Whenever you are given a piece of elastic your nose begins to bleed. I blame factors from before your birth. Namely, your abnormally long umbilical cord.”

At her mother’s mention of her umbilical cord, Melba probed her bellybutton.

“I didn’t know about my abnormally long umbilical cord,” cried Melba. “Can I see it?”

“I buried it in a secret place and disguised the map,” said Gigi Zuzzo, sharply. “You’re better off not seeing something like that, Melba.”

“You’ll never develop normal attachments,” sighed Gigi Zuzzo. “We’ve never been as close as other mothers and daughters, have we Melba?” But Melba was concentrating and barely heard her mother’s question.

“Those years that I had the hiccups,” asked Melba. “Was that because of my umbilical cord?”

“It was,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “And that’s the least of it! The cord’s torsional compression in the womb cut off blood flow to your brain and dried out your brainpan. Your brainpan cracked in half! Toxified brain fluid leaked into my blood stream! I was nearly poisoned! I had to drink charcoal every day for a week!”

“The toxic brain fluid,” asked Melba. “Did that reach your womb through osmosis? Or was there another process involved?”

“What other process is there?” barked Gigi Zuzzo.

“I don’t know,” said Melba quietly. “Reverse osmosis, probably.”

“No one said anything about processes, reversible or otherwise,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “Though the charcoal explains your hairs and your eye color, Melba.” Melba’s hairs were much blacker than the hairs of her mother, father, and sister, and she had not inherited the blue eyes of her mother and father, having instead dull, protuberant black eyes, which Randal Hans once told her resembled the eyes of a deer with a neck wound.

Melba heeded her mother, and only visited the hosiery district during the day. Outside Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail, the women always seemed to be eating darkened wormy apples. They ate the apples rapidly, producing them one after the other from huge burlap sacks, until a man with a whistle appeared from nowhere, and the women hurried through the metal side-door of Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail, hauling the sacks between them.

As she watched the women from the culvert, Melba would feel the muscles on the sides of her tongue shivering. She longed for just a tiny bite of an oddly-shaped mahogany apple! Until one day Melba Zuzzo could not contain herself. Just as the metal side-door swung shut behind the women, she lunged from the culvert and scuttled across the gravel lot, searching for a discarded apple core. Something dark and slick glinted in the gravel. Melba Zuzzo picked the thing up impulsively and thrust it in her mouth. She recognized the taste! It tasted like when, as a child, she had mashed anchovy in the wall socket and licked the wall socket on all fours, pretending that she was an animal navigating a maze in the service of science. Melba’s mouth flooded with saliva. She shuddered. She wondered how the women could maintain their appearances of solid and attractive tidiness while lunching on such apples. The pH of their saliva must be 1! Or 0! What did this saliva do to tooth enamel? Were the women’s tongues corroded? For a moment, Melba doubted the sanity of the women, but the moment passed quickly. Melba realized that the dark thing she had discovered was not an apple core, but rather a metal whistle. She spat a hasp and a bit of broken chain into her palm. Suddenly, a man was running toward her. Melba recognized him as the man with the whistle, for even without the whistle, his lips formed a tense repellant O. Melba fled, the man’s whistle clamped in her mouth, her breath chirping as it divided inside the whistle, deflecting down into the whistle’s dank chamber and up across the whistle’s slot. Finally Melba reached a phone booth and ducked inside. She had no desire to keep the whistle in her mouth and removed it immediately.

“What a horrid, strident device,” thought Melba Zuzzo angrily as she shoved the whistle in the change slot.

Shortly after this disappointing episode, Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail went out of business. Melba heard that it reopened days later as a travel agency but she never saw anyone coming in or out and weeds grew up thickly in the gravel lot and it became customary for people to drive up to the gravel lot in the night to dump mattresses. What had happened to the women with their sacks of apples?

It was possible that they were sent on a group tour of a foreign land by the travel agency. Melba Zuzzo liked to think of the women eating apples, perhaps beside the Great Wall of China. Eating apples beside the Great Wall of China, a landmark of interest to people in space, the women had a very high chance of being photographed by satellites. Someday Melba hoped to go to a space station, or to Florida, to NASA headquarters. She would eat the astronaut ice cream she had heard so much about and she would buy a satellite photograph of the Earth. Running her magnifying glass along the Great Wall of China, she might at last obtain proof that the women still existed. The women would be unmistakable, crouched in the weeds with their cheeks filled with apples, and Melba knew they could still break her heart with their beauty, even in a photograph taken from the distance of the moon.

The bakery’s wall-phone rang and Melba sprang from her stool to answer.

“Bev!” cried a voice. Melba rested her forehead against the wall, cradling the receiver on her shoulder.

“Men lactate,” she said, at last. “I’ve never seen it happen, but they can. I heard from a man who did it. Not at a mere whim!” said Melba hurriedly. “I’m not trying to say that men lactate frivolously. It requires duress, great duress, but it can be done,” whispered Melba. “Like on the Oregon Trail. Don’t you believe me?”

“Bev!” cried the voice and Melba slowly hung up the phone.

I don’t have any obligation to inform Ned Hat, she reminded herself. It’s not as though I
am
Bev Hat, no matter what he says. She saw Grady Help’s profile moving along the bakery window at head height.

“Grady Help!” she called, running to the door. “Wait!” Grady Help had an open sore on his temple and stopped walking at Melba’s cry, looking around dimly, a finger in his ear.

“I’m here,” said Melba, rushing up to him. “Right in front of you.”

She felt the strangeness of stopping a man like Grady Help on the street.

Grady Help had once been a victim, and as such was not usually spoken to directly. Melba had herself inquired about Grady Help from time to time, asking other townspeople how he was doing and whether he had preferences in daily activities, but facing him now she could not help but feel flustered and importuning. He hasn’t been a victim for years, she reminded herself, at least not actively, and so she pressed on.

“Bev Hat is dead,” she blurted and wrenched at the waist, burying her face in her hands.

“Well that’s not so,” said Grady Help gently and Melba uncovered her face. Grady Help’s voice was soft and weak but it did not break. It wasn’t precisely
firm
, thought Melba, but it held together, possessed of a coagulated quality, like the innocuous cheese Zeno Zuzzo fed her after meals for several months when she was still a schoolgirl. He claimed it was an experiment, although he had never told her the purpose or results. Melba almost smiled at Grady Help’s voice; it was a triumph for a former victim, she reasoned, and blushed, not knowing the best way to recognize a former victim’s triumph, if tacit approval was suitable or if something more demonstrative was in order, and if the former, how to be certain the tacit approval had registered as such, and if the latter, whether or not the demonstration should center around an impulsive hug, and if yes, how to summon sufficient propulsion and which part of Grady Help’s loosely jointed body to encircle. Perhaps she should just grasp his hand in both of hers and press the knuckles to her cheek.

While she hesitated, Grady Help slowly looked Melba up and down.

“Bev Hat isn’t dead,” he said. “Why I saw her yesterday.”

“But that’s just it, Grady,” said Melba, forgetting his victimization as thoughts of Bev Hat’s deadness rushed back. “To know someone is alive you have to see them right now.”

Grady Help blinked. “I don’t see a lot of people right now, Melba,” he said. “In fact, right now I see you. Only you, Melba.” Melba spun around, gazed down the empty street. Above the street, a large black bag hanging from a wire snapped in the wind. Melba shuddered. The wind blew harder. The wire was anchored at each end in a metal eyelet driven between bricks in the facades of two opposite-facing buildings, and Melba detected the low sound of the eyelets groaning. Farther down the street, she noticed the flags that usually hung so limply from the cantilevered gaffs alongside the second-story windows of the Dan Hotel leaping about, bright and agitated. The wind was active, moving around, having effects, but it wasn’t a person, and Melba looked back at Grady Help. He was right. She was the only one.

Melba opened her mouth then closed it. How did Grady Help know her name? They had watched an animated television program about hot air balloons in adjacent folding chairs in the school auditorium before Grady Help became a victim but he couldn’t possibly remember that. He was so different back then, strawberry blond and dressed in neatly pressed chino cloth. Was it that her name was one of the names known to men in Dan? She doubted it. She knew from experience that Melba Zuzzo wasn’t a name that appealed to men, not like the names Adele Pear or Stella Duck. Once, when Randal Hans had been her boyfriend, he and Melba had gone stargazing in the swamp. They lay down side by side on a wide plank and looked up at the sky. It was a clear night, all of the stars were displayed, and for a time Melba spoke with Randal Hans about their uneven distribution. In certain regions of the sky, stars clustered thickly, so thickly some mushed together, formed clumps, each double, triple, quadruple the size of a regular star, and with an oozy, bursting brightness. In other regions, darkness dominated, rich and plain, scarcely flecked, another kind of sky altogether. It was as though the night were a batter poorly mixed, a batter into which bagged blueberries had been introduced by an amateur baker, a woman who had never worked at a bakery, who shook the berries from the bag and folded them, still frozen, into the batch, so that two distinct types of muffins resulted from the oven, the one type heavy with fruit, the other dry and light, almost a biscuit.