Esther Stories (5 page)

Hal’s eyes got red, and he thrust down the last of his 7-Up. “I tell you, the man thought he’d reached beyond the grave, that after thousands of ‘Ravens’ he’d finally broken through to someone. To the devil, to God, to Poe himself, or—” Hal paused and we all leaned forward. I noticed Hal’s gums had turned the color of ash. “Or, to his own Lenore.”

When he reached the poem’s final moment, Smiling Poe said so softly you had to strain to hear him, like a man swimming to the surface of a dream:

And he waited, as though he actually expected the dread word to come later than before. And he stood there smiling that awful smile, his legs akimbo.

And still there was nothing from the corner.

“I didn’t look at Growling Poe at that point,” Hal said. “How could I? Man so cruel to lead another man into belief and then rip the rug out like it’s nothing.”

Smiling Poe didn’t continue. Hal told us that after his unfinished “Raven,” he just walked out, although there was a good fifteen minutes left in his show and Montresor still had to murder Fortunato. They listened to his slow clod up the stairs. Nobody moved. Everybody, even the cats, watched the corner. Hal said he even prayed. Then Hal backed up his chair, dropped three quarters on the table, and left us. We listened to one of the quarters bounce and spin before landing flat, and we felt ashamed, though we couldn’t have said why. And even now, even years after, when shame still coats us like the fine dust we often wear, thanks to the cement factory north of town, we still can’t say why.

They found him Wednesday morning drooping from a light fixture in his hotel room. There was an unfinished sandwich on the table and two black suits in the closet. The coroner said, medically speaking, Smiling Poe had been dead for at least eight hours, but the cleaning woman who found him swore—she still swears—that when she opened the door he was still writhing, that he didn’t stop moving until she touched him, poor man, never seen anybody look so lonely—not dead, lonely.

T
HE PHONE
deadly silent, I recall a certain pair of shoes.

We were at Ike’s, at our table by the window, having burgers and sloppy cheese fries, and I was whining about Devon and how she’d dumped me for the twenty-seventh time. On my ass this time, I said. And this time, this time, I swear I won’t call her back when she calls. This time I’m going to have R-E-S-O-L-V-E. This time when I say I’m going to do something, by fucking God, I’m going to do it. Cal yawned a long yawn. He’d heard it all before and didn’t want to waste his breath on eloquence he’d already orated, as he put it. We were circling again. Ike’s, burgers, cheese fries, Devon dumping me number 22, 23, 24, 25, 26…But during take number 27 something happened, something that pushed us out of our routine. A woman’s voice. Crass and loud and roaring and beautiful and low. A woman’s voice, upstairs, in the apartment above Ike’s.

Liar! Nobody lies like you! Nobody! You lie and you lie and you lie, and when you say you’re not lying anymore, you lie about whether you’re lying.

Bullshit, a man retorted. Meek, but not dead yet. Bullshit. What about Martin Jumbileau?

Martin Jumbileau? she raged. Martin Jumbileau! You mean you’re going to bring him into this? Like I’m some kind of lowlife you pulled off the street and saved. Tanya’s right. You are foul.

Then she winged her shoes at him.

I know this because Cal and I were sitting there listening, wiping our hands on our pants—Ike’s got no napkins—when two white shoes dropped into the street like tiny planes crash-landing. Women’s patent-leather pumps with straps. They lay sprawled on the pavement, toe to toe, linked in the agony of the fall.

Cal and I stared out the window at those snazzy shoes as we listened to the silence of victory unfold in the apartment upstairs. And the world was merciful. It did stop its spin, and those shoes were angels dispatched to rescue ourselves from our own grease-soaked and burbling-over hearts.

O
N A THURSDAY NIGHT
, in the tiny men’s room at the Gopher Hole in Gilbertsville, Iowa, in the infamous pisser with the hidden step down—ask Candice what happened to Frank Knipp’s forehead when it met the urinal after he tripped in the dark—the other Frank, the quiet one, Frank Waverly, saw something alarming in the mirror. Odd furrows, just above and below his eyes, ruts that looked like they were somehow getting deeper by the moment. And his cheeks were now twin percolating spasms. Frank Waverly stared at himself. He’d had two, three beers; he wasn’t drunk. Frank Waverly rarely got drunk. He was known as a light drinker who thought a lot about things, a methodical man who trolled around for answers before making judgments. For this reason, he was a man who could always be called upon to fix odd things—not because he was so clever with his hands, but because he studied what was wrong with something before he touched any of the parts.

Examining his face more closely, Frank went through some of the possible explanations for this strange turmoil. He knew immediately that whatever it was had nothing to do with fear of marriage, of having to be with Nancy forever even if things didn’t pan out, or fear that sex wouldn’t be any good after. All that crap that Raymond and Pauly Sicosh kept razzing him about. He wasn’t afraid of weddings—it was the only thing he’d ever really wanted. When they were boys, his brother Lance drew pictures of himself as a dentist torturing babies; Frank’s drawings were of tuxedos and veils and four-story cakes the size of the Kickapoo township landfill. So it wasn’t Nancy. Nor was it her last name, which was enough to shrivel the balls of most men in town. You had to tread carefully when dealing with a Degardelle, particularly a female Degardelle. If something went wrong, you’d end up with a posse of mothers and aunts and eighteenth cousins chasing you to Sioux City with shovels and rakes and firearms. Nobody (and this had been true, people said, since the Civil War) embarrassed that family and got away with it. Chick Larson’s stunt with Nancy’s cousin Theresa was an obvious case in point. His famous two-days-before-the-wedding waffle; now he lives under Buicks at the Jiffy Lube in Cedar Falls. But Frank had gone to school with Degardelles (Randall, Stevo, Little Joey). He’d delivered pizzas with Degardelles (Little Joey, Nancy’s older sister Steph). He’d been surrounded his whole life by that locally royal family. He wasn’t intimidated by them and besides—and on this he truly walked alone—he actually liked Nancy’s mother. Not accepted, feared, or stood in awe of, but liked. She had been his third-grade teacher (now she was Superintendent of Schools), and even though she’d stomped on his foot whenever he stuttered his T’s, she’d taught him to read.

The bizarre doings in his face didn’t stop. His gurgling cheeks were beginning to expand. He thought of Nancy after she got her wisdom teeth pulled and came home morphed into Louis Armstrong. And it wasn’t that Nancy talked too much, even though she did. That was what he loved about her, that she never stopped the chatter, that she went on about who knew what half the time. Babbling onward about Nick Desmond’s wife, Suzie, and how nuts she was with her backward jogging. Then she’d switch and talk about summers up at the Degardelle family cottage in Rhinelander. Then, a related story, maybe, about her Uncle Vasco and his seasonally wandering hands. Then she’d inexplicably about-face into another merciless attack on Barbra Streisand. “I mean what the hell do I care how many neuroses she has?” What mattered to Frank was not the content but the dependability of her patter. Nancy filled the often unendurable silences of his life. He didn’t exist in silence literally. S and F Packaging was as loud a place as any. It was just that there were times in the day—even when he was working side by side with people—when he’d feel the silence build to a low whine, as if a mosquito were trapped and slowly dying in his ear. An odd, sometimes nagging, sometimes blissful silence that cut him off from everybody, even his closest friends, guys he’d grown up with and now worked beside. Guys whose kids called him the Other Uncle Frank on the Fourth of July. For the most part he hid the problem well. Nobody except Nancy even knew about it. Whenever it was obvious to others that Frank was trying to read their lips rather than listen to them, most just thought, That’s Frank Waverly, thinking so hard about other things that he can’t keep up.

For a long time he’d been certain that his brother was the cause of what he considered his private condition. He might be filling an invoice code or on hold with a wholesaler when he’d be struck by the simple thudding fact of his brother. That his brother hiccuped, that his brother farted, that he could do both, proudly, at the same time. That it was Lance who once changed the channel for an entire hour. That Lance was the one who squirted his mother’s hair jizz in both his ears and asked him if he could hear the Pacific Ocean now. That he was the one who cross-country skied on the roof of Hoover Elementary and whooped at the fat cop to come up and get him if it was so illegal. That it was Lance who threw the alarm clock and then the basketball to wake him up on the morning of a day he has no other reason to remember now. Sometimes he thinks he’s co-opted his brother’s dumbest memories and made them his own, because remembering what Lance did is easier than remembering the physical Lance, the one with the disgusting fungus toes, the one who slept with his eyes half open, like a bad imitation of a dead guy.

Frank gripped the sides of the sink and glared at himself in the murky light. Someone jiggled the door handle. Frank’s shoulders knotted, the way they did if anyone tapped him from behind when he was in the silence. Except now he was watching it happen in the mirror, and it wasn’t temporary. His shoulders stayed hunched. The ruts around his eyes were deepening into ditches and his cheeks were still blimping. A dark-purple fluid was beginning to drip from his nose into the sink. The handle rattled again. Frank managed a shallow “Still in here.” Whoever it was—it sounded like Tony Lemoyne—said, “Laying an egg in there or what?” Frank didn’t answer. He just kept staring. Not only at everything that was going wrong in his face, but also at the things that remained the same. His skimpy eyebrows, his slightly bucked teeth, his disproportionately fat upper lip. At the mustache he’d hated for six months but didn’t shave off and couldn’t say why not. He pressed the tab of the soap dispenser and caught the pink splat. He foamed up his face and rinsed, but still couldn’t get rid of any of it, what was new or what was him. He checked his pulse, which seemed okay, though the Red Cross class had been years ago and he couldn’t remember how long to keep his fingers on his wrist. But there was a beat there. One, one, one, one, one. Then he said, out loud, “God?” It was unlike Frank in that he didn’t think about it before he blurted. It came from his mouth not his brain. Here in this bathroom that Candice cleans twice a year, once because she always hides Easter eggs behind the toilet and again before the health inspector comes. That asshole Lemoyne kicked the door. “There’s a man out here that’s gonna start squealing like a pig.” Frank laughed, but not at Lemoyne. No one laughed at Lemoyne, even when he was funny. Nancy once asked him if he was an atheist. Her Grandmother Degardelle was worried. He’d lied, said he was a believer. Now here he is, a secret blasphemer, in this stink of a bathroom with Tony Lemoyne holding his legs together outside the door, trying to read his face for a message from on high. Shit, if John Denver can talk to Him in the rearview mirror of a Pinto, why not me? He hoped it didn’t have anything to do with politics, because he hadn’t read the
Register
in days. Maybe this has something to do with Sadaam again. Another call to arms. Rallying the troops to kill some more Arabs in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. If that was the case, though, why wouldn’t He go through Raymond, because he’d been in Desert Storm the first time around and he was right there at the bar? (Or Nancy, because she videotapes C-Span.) Frank’s eyes turned from their usual hazy brown to black, and his upper lip curled over his mustache and began to dam up the purple fluid, so that he started to breathe it back up his nose. He finally got scared and considered leaving his face and calling Nancy—Candice would let him use the phone behind the bar. He would tell her what was happening, and Nancy would say, Wow, Frank, reminds me of that Bible thumper convention my sister Julia dragged me to: eighty thousand people in a football stadium taking turns narrating their personal experiences with God. God on the call-waiting, God on the intercom at the Department of Motor Vehicles, God in the plastic-only recyclables. What’d you say was wrong with your nose, Frank? Disgusting purple what’s coming out of your nostrils?

Talk about embarrassing Degardelles if he walked out of there looking like this. He thought of what Lance would say if he could see him now.
You know the real miracle here, Frank, is that you haven’t gotten all that uglier.
And it was then that he prayed, for the first time, without watching himself and laughing. Prayed that his brother, though he loved to inflict pain, had felt none. Frank prayed standing, still gripping the sink, still watching the siege in his face. Lance changing a tire too close to the road and the trucker, who maybe dozed for a split second or maybe didn’t see him, edged a sliver to the right and, without even nicking the Impala, ended Lance at seventeen. He prayed for Lance and the trucker who’d scooped him up and brought the bloody mass that was his brother to the emergency room. When the trucker heard that Lance was gone, he’d stormed out of the hospital and dumped his cargo into the parking lot, kicking and dragging boxes, ranting,
How late, Mr. Haskins? How fucking late am I now, Mr. Keith Haskins?
He went on for hours, whacking away at boxes and cursing Haskins. His mother always insisted that the trucker’s performance in the parking lot was grief over himself, over the potential loss of his job, his license, his reputation. She said she forgave him, but that didn’t mean she had to believe him. I’m sorry to say it, she said, but nobody gets that crazy over a stranger. But Frank had an idea then—and he was only twelve when all this happened—that his mother was a fool. And here was that trucker now staring out from his own bloated face, still furious, still shouting—on his way somewhere then, now going nowhere, still in the parking lot hysterical.

Lemoyne kicked the door harder. Some other guys joined him. He heard Candice say, Maybe he knocked himself out like Frank Knipp did that time. What’s with the Franks? Maybe they should start pissing in the alley behind Daskell’s. And he heard Raymond shout: “You defrosting the tenderloin in there, Frank?” Somebody—it sounded like Cash Lorimer—asked why Candice didn’t just go and get the key, and Candice screamed, It bolts from the inside, dildo! Frank pinched the bulb of his oozing nose and tried to hold his breath. Raymond had once told him that there’s no real difference between faith and endurance. He talked about the waiting and the hoping after he got back from the Gulf, even though he’d confessed in a whisper to Frank that working the computer on the USS
Saratoga
was about as dangerous as dealing blackjack on the gambling boat in Bettendorf. “Even had women commanders in tight pants. Not like my Uncle Telly getting his ass cheeks shot off at Chu Lai.” He thought of Nancy’s fearless gobble-gobble. How there was always the chance she’d circle around to a point. So he continued to watch himself as the old familiar silence engulfed his ears and the racket they were making outside the door became low and faintly melodious, and then it got so soft he couldn’t hear it anymore, like the moment just after a song fades for good but somehow it’s still there. And even later, when their pounding drifted as far away as his brother, he recalled the shouts, their concern, their alarm, with fondness.