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InterText Vol 09 No 02
==========================================
InterText Vol. 9, No. 2 / March-April 1999
==========================================
Contents
FirstText: Since We Last Spoke... .............. Jason Snell
Cinderblock ................................. Marcus Eubanks
The Smart Bomb ............................ Richard K. Weems
The Waterspout ............................... Redmond James
Chicken Bone Man ............................ Anna Olswanger
....................................................................
Editor Assistant Editor
Jason Snell Geoff Duncan
jsnell@intertext.com geoff@intertext.com
....................................................................
Submissions Panelists:
Joe Dudley, Morten Lauritsen, Jason Snell
....................................................................
Send correspondence to editors@intertext.com or
intertext@intertext.com
....................................................................
InterText Vol. 9, No. 2. InterText (ISSN 1071-7676) is published
electronically on a bi-monthly basis. Reproduction of this magazine
is permitted as long as the magazine is not sold (either by itself
or as part of a collection) and the entire text of the issue remains
unchanged. Copyright 1999 Jason Snell. All stories Copyright 1999 by
their respective authors. For more information about InterText, send
a message to info@intertext.com. For submission guidelines, send a
message to guidelines@intertext.com.
....................................................................
FirstText: Since We Last Spoke... by Jason Snell
====================================================
Once upon a time I wrote one of these columns every month,
"whether I had anything to say or not," as I said in the most
recent one. That was more than a year ago, and plenty of things
have changed since then.
When last I wrote, my wife and I were looking for a new place to
live, because she and I had both undergone job changes and we
needed to be closer to where she worked. Not only have we made
that move, but we've moved since -- this time, to a house we
bought a couple of months ago. I'd call buying a house a major
life change, and that's just the most recent one.
When last I wrote, my professional life was in a bit of turmoil.
My previous employer, MacUser magazine, had merged with its
archrival, Macworld. The resulting magazine (also called
Macworld) was still my employer, but I can tell you that things
were mighty rocky. You'd think that two organizations with so
many similarities -- they covered the same topic, were both
monthly magazines owned by large computer-magazine publishing
companies -- were pretty much alike. But, in fact, the two
magazines and their cultures couldn't have been more different.
It led to lots of personality clashes, culture clashes, pain,
and suffering. When my uncle (whose company underwent a major
business merger a few years earlier) warned me that this merger
business wasn't ever easy, he wasn't kidding.
Now I'm feeling a bit more stable at Macworld, running the
magazine's features section. It's a kick to get paid to do what
you've always done as a hobby, but it's still enjoyable to
branch out and do things that don't involve writing _about_
technology -- that's where InterText and my other online
publishing project, TeeVee, come in.
<http://www.teevee.org/>
There have been some other momentous changes in the world around
me, too. Our friends Adam and Tonya Engst, the publishers of
TidBITS, had their first child, Tristan, in January. In addition
to being famous for TidBITS and his Internet Starter Kit books,
Adam wrote two stories for InterText and still writes for me at
Macworld on a semi-regular basis.
<http://www.tidbits.com/>
Another longtime Friend of TeeVee -- his stories appeared in our
first few issues, he wrote key material for our "theme issue"
back in 1994, and he's one of the people who pitch in with
TeeVee -- is Greg Knauss. Greg and his wife Joanne also had
their first child, Thomas, in January. I guess January's a big
time for babies!
In addition to explaining why I haven't written a column, the
other popular InterText column topic is asking for volunteer
help. And I don't want to disappoint on that side, especially
since we can always use the help.
InterText is run entirely on a volunteer basis. Nobody gives us
money. Geoff Duncan and I edit InterText out of our interest in
doing it, and not because we're getting kickbacks from some
shadowy investor. It's been that way since we started this eight
years ago.
But as I've said, times change. Neither Geoff nor I have the
time to spend on InterText that we did eight years ago. We've
gotten some great added help over the years -- most especially
the InterText submissions panel, which has been ably led by the
generous and wise Joe Dudley. The submissions panel, if you
weren't aware, is an ever-changing group of people who receive
every single story submitted to InterText, read them, and give
each story a rating. The work of that group helps the
story-selection process immeasurably, acting as a reality check
for me and highlighting stories that they feel really deserve to
be seen by InterText's readers.
Lately that panel's active participants has dwindled quite a
bit, so I'm using this part of the column to actively recruit
new members. If you're interested in wading through a large
volume of story submissions -- 35 per month, on average -- mail
<editors@intertext.com> and let us know. Be warned: this isn't
an easy job. There's a lot of mail, and to be brutally honest,
there are far more weak stories than good ones in the pile. But
if you have the time, the disposition, and an inclination to
help out InterText, we'd love to have you take a crack at it.
Likewise, I'd like to appeal to the writers out there to submit
their stories to InterText. As always, we still can't pay our
writers -- that "no money" thing again, and I'd pay them out of
my own pocket if it weren't for this nasty mortgage payment of
mine. But I firmly believe that InterText offers a level of
exposure that most Internet publications can't provide, and it's
my hope that people around the Net see publication in InterText
as having some value -- as the members of our submissions panel
know, it's not as though we print every story that people send
to us. Far from it.
Finally, I'd like to thank all of our readers, and encourage
that you recommend InterText to a friend. We publish the
magazine in many forms -- on the Web, in printable PDF and
PostScript versions, and even portable PalmPilot and Newton
books. There's an InterText edition for everyone out there!
Jason Snell (jsnell@intertext.com)
------------------------------------
This week Jason Snell is the features editor at Macworld
magazine. In what passes for his spare time, he edits
InterText and TeeVee.
Cinderblock by Marcus Eubanks
=================================
....................................................................
The role of a doctor is to save a patient's life.
Even if that struggle is futile.
....................................................................
It's another late afternoon at work, all of us rushing around
like mad to get things done so we can sign out to the on-call
team and get home. Service on the Intensive Care Unit makes for
pretty full days -- not necessarily breakneck pace all the time,
but you go directly from one task to the next all the same, with
very little downtime.
My part of the team is composed of three individuals: an
upper-year resident; an intern; and me, the medical student.
There are three such groups making up the unit team as a whole,
in addition to the critical-care nurses and assorted medical
techs, without whom the whole works would come to an abrupt,
grinding halt. If you do the math, it works out to three or four
caregivers for every patient, twenty-four hours a day. The whole
circus is overseen by the Attending and the Fellow, who somehow
manage to give us enough slack to run things on our own while
managing through some arcane trick of omniscience to know
everything that transpires even as it goes down.
The three of us are working our way through the litany of
routine afternoon tasks when news comes down from The Powers
That Be that we're getting a transfer from an outlying hospital.
Word is that the hit will be a 27-year-old shooter with
right-sided endocarditis. In itself an infected heart in an
intravenous drug user is no big deal. It's serious, don't
misunderstand, but not good reason in itself for transfer to our
facility.
The catch is that her course has become complicated by septic
emboli to her lungs, which changes the picture dramatically.
With all those nasty bacteria in her blood and lungs producing
their various toxins, she's developing full-blown ARDS, the
adult respiratory distress syndrome. ARDS is bad news -- your
lungs suffer some sort of insult which causes the exchange
surface to stiffen and swell up, and you die by slow
suffocation.
There's also a brief mention that she might have suffered a
miscarriage, but it's unclear if anything has been done to
address that aspect of her illness. We're told that her
boyfriend was recently diagnosed HIV positive. Before we even
see her, it's sounding like a really ugly scene.
Some hours later, she actually arrives at our hospital. We meet
her on the helipad only to discover that she's in the process of
dropping her pressures, her sats, and you can bet her level of
consciousness. At the time of her arrival she is very nearly in
cardiac arrest. We manage to get her to the unit, bagging her
all the while, blowing huge volumes of pure oxygen into her
lungs with a blue plastic squeeze bulb about the size of a rugby
ball. The air goes from the squeeze bulb through a large-bore
tube which passes through her mouth and into her trachea.
"What's her name?" I ask, and amidst the confusion someone from
the transport teams shouts, "Carmen." "Okay, Carmen," I tell
her, leaning over her face so she can see me. "Try to relax and
let us breathe for you."
She looks terrified out of her mind, eyes wide and jumping
around crazily as she attempts to comprehend what is going on.
Her blood pressure remains dangerously low, and we consider
starting a norepinephrine drip.
Norepi's interesting stuff -- it's the heart of the rush you get
when you nearly fall from a great height, or you come close to
killing someone in a blind rage. It does lots of funky things to
your body, among them cranking your blood pressure through the
roof.
We get the drip hung just in time for her to start to recover on
her own. IV's started, lines working, numbers improving, then
the magic word: _Oops._
"Oops what?" I say, looking up quickly at the nurse who uttered
it. "What do you mean, 'oops?'"
"Well, I just flushed your new IV with norepi," she says,
looking sheepish. I look over at the monitor, and the flickering
amber numbers there make the fact abundantly clear. It's okay,
though -- Carmen is young and resilient. A couple of minutes
later her blood pressure backs down out of the stratosphere, and
she's looking sort of all right.
All right is relative, though. She's awake and terribly
frightened, but she looks sick. Even though she's very weak, her
reflexive efforts to fight us are starting to become an
impediment to our various interventions. It soon becomes
apparent that we're going to have to put her down.
Her lungs are in sorry shape indeed, you see, and it turns out
that our standard ventilator -- which is a marvel of flexibility
and clean design -- simply lacks the brute power to develop
enough pressure to inflate them. Her convulsive attempts at
breathing are ineffective but are still enough to badly confuse
the sophisticated computer which runs the machine, making the
problem even worse.
In other words, for us to be able to manage her dire status we
will have to paralyze and sedate her. We give her a bolus of a
close relative of curare, and add in a whopping huge dose of one
of Valium's myriad offspring. She drifts away from us in a
pharmaceutical haze, rapidly becoming oblivious to the gross
indignities we are committing upon her.
The boyfriend tested HIV+, but we're told that Carmen's serology
came back negative.
She has children.
She also has stiff, horribly damaged lungs. Over the course of
time, bacteria from her skin have gained access to her
circulation by way of the needles she uses to inject smack or
coke or speed or whatever it is that she likes to shoot.
Generally speaking, getting a couple of bacteria into your
bloodstream isn't such a big deal. You and I probably become
transiently bacteremic every time we brush our teeth vigorously;
a few bugs making their way from traumatized gums into our
blood. Our immune systems laugh at this small invasion,
effortlessly clearing it in moments.
Carmen, on the other hand, has been injecting her circulation
with nasty skin bugs in rather large numbers, and has been doing
so for quite some time. The critters have taken up residence on
the valves of her heart, causing the edges to heap themselves up
into little septic mountains. Not only has this rendered the
valves useless because they no longer fit together cleanly, but
it seems that chunks of septic tissue have broken loose from
them to seed her lungs. The bacteria make toxic products, and
her own immune system only compounds the damage by trying to
kill them off. Immunological warfare is a bloody business: your
white blood cells make toxins of their own, all the better to
kill with. The problem is that these products are
indiscriminate, damaging your own lung tissue as easily as the
foreign bacteria.
"Her lungs are about as flexible as cinderblocks," the Attending
tells us one morning on rounds. He is a man of wry wit and an
astounding fund of knowledge. The discourse has turned to the
perils of high-pressure ventilation, and the woefully few ways
of mitigating them.
A little later, the team is gathered together in one of the
reading rooms in the radiology suite to review daily films when
the radiologist stops in startled amazement. He turns to look at
us with big eyes, his quick repartee momentarily derailed.
"She's going to pop," he intones, pointing at an x-ray. "Look at
these lung bases, here and here. She's a-gonna blow."
The Attending shakes his head ruefully at the rest of us. He'd
told us the same thing upon her arrival a couple of days ago,
when he and the Fellow first started jacking up the pressures on
the ventilator.
Forty minutes after rounds, the grim prophesy is fulfilled.
Carmen's lungs, after fifty or sixty hours of being subjected to
pressures they were never meant to see, develop holes -- at
least one on each side. High-pressure jets from these holes
cause rapidly growing bubbles of air to collect between the
outer surface of the lungs and the inner surface of her chest
wall, causing her lungs to collapse. The result is that her
usable gas-exchange surface is acutely diminished, and the
amount of oxygen entering her blood falls precipitously.
We have been expecting this, and so the tools are ready, hung
from the wall at the head of her bed with thick white bands of
silk tape. The Fellow pokes holes in her chest wall with scalpel
and hemostat, one on each side. We thread long, flexible tubes
through these holes into the offending bubbles, and the air from
her thorax comes rushing out in a long quiet sigh. With the next
gasp of the ventilator, her lungs reinflate.
Even with the chest-tubes vented to suction ports on the wall,
some of the air escaping her lungs tracks its way through the
various tissues of her chest. After a while it starts to show up
on the daily x-rays, throwing her musculature into dramatic
relief. I can actually feel it when I touch her. When I push
down lightly on her skin the sensation returned is that of
hundreds of little bubbles popping, which is exactly what is
happening. The air begins to track its way down her arms and,
grim though it sounds, Carmen begins to take on the appearance
of an inflatable toy.
A couple of nights later we decide that another vascular access
might be prudent, so I take it upon myself to obtain one. She's
a difficult stick, what with years of sclerosing her veins with
the impurities in the drugs she injects, but I somehow manage to
get a good line on the second try. Instead of taking pride in my
growing skill (or exquisite luck, in this case) I walk away
feeling queasy and ill.
One of the things you try when you have a hard time finding
veins is slapping lightly on the patient's arm, as it often
makes them stand out a bit more proudly. I try this on Carmen,
and it sounds and feels exactly like slapping an air mattress,
or one of those rafts you rent at the beach. I do it a couple
more times than I really need to, just to convince myself that
it isn't all in my head.
Carmen continues to pop her lungs over the next few days. First
two tubes, then three. Next she has four. She's starting to look
like -- well, I don't know what she looks like, other than a
very, very sick young woman. Metaphor seems inappropriate. I
wander into her room late at night when I'm on call, just to
look at her. With the sheets freshly changed and drawn up to her
chin, I can almost forget the lines and hoses and the insistent
cycling of the ventilator. With a bit of imagination I can
almost see what she might look like in quiet repose. I can't
quite make it, though, because of the trache tube protruding
from her throat (placed yesterday so we could get the breathing
tube out of her mouth) and because of the feeding tube running
into her nose (which I so carefully placed, and then taped just
so, so it wouldn't place undue pressure on her nostril and leave
a scar) or the fact that she's swollen up, literally turned into
a balloon by the subcutaneous air.
I walk into the room and peer into her face, wondering what
surcease from the world her drugs gave her. I look at her,
appalled to see someone my age so horribly, direly ill. Carmen
is going to die. I know it. We all know it. I catch myself
speaking to her softly, telling her to hang on, and then I feel
like a complete and utter idiot. We're giving her enough
sedative to crush a horse. She's so completely snowed under all
of our drugs that I might as well be talking to myself. When it
comes down to it, I guess I am. The fact that I've become a
parody of the worst medical dramas ever written isn't lost on me
either.
Carmen doesn't so much have lungs anymore as gills. She lives by
passive membrane oxygenation, just like a fish. We blow
oxygen-rich air into her trachea, it passes over an exchange
surface, and then out the chest-tubes into wall suction. The
ventilator, a custom European model, hisses continuously day and
night sounding like a pathologically pissed-off Kimodo Dragon on
amphetamines.
One afternoon, about three o'clock, her sats start to drop
again. We end up bagging her with the blue squeeze bulb while
someone calls the Fellow. He rushes into the room, stashing his
coffee on the sill outside.
"I think she's dropped a lung again," I offer.
"Well jeezus, it doesn't take much of an intuitive leap to
figure that out," he says. "The question is where to go in." He
is tired and frustrated, having been up all night with someone
who had just undergone a lung transplant. He continues, speaking
more to himself than anyone else. "Aw man, what an incredible
disaster. Talk about a train wreck."
We get the stat chest x-ray, not to prove that we've blown
another hole in her lungs somewhere, but to give us an aiming
point. Not too many minutes later we have the information we
want, and we start prepping her for her fifth tube.
"Pretty grim prognosis, huh?" I ask in a dazzling burst of
medical-student brilliance, while helping him to set up the
sterile field.
He gives me a ludicrous look, then glances quickly upward as if
appealing to the heavens for self-restraint. "Yeah. Like she has
a prognosis. Sure."
He looks down again, continuing to scrub her skin with
antibacterial soap. "Do you know how many people there are out
there who have survived lung damage like this?"
I shake my head.
"None. Zero. Big ol' empty set."
The conversation in her room has become increasingly macabre in
the last couple of days. Various medical students and residents
from other services filter in and out, some just to marvel. Word
of Carmen has spread, and we take a sort of perverse delight in
relating her clinical course to gawking bystanders.
Placement of the tube is quickly done, as the fellow doesn't
bother with an anesthetic, reasoning that she's so heavily
sedated that she can't feel anything -- more deeply unconscious
than the most profound sleep. This same reasoning has loosened
our inhibitions about talking in front of her. Her numbers start
to get better, and she goes back on the vent.
A couple of hours later the surgery resident comes by to place
yet another chest tube. We could do it ourselves, but the
surgeons do more of them, and often have better luck getting the
end of it exactly where it needs to be. He brings his own
instruments, and thus is far better equipped than we are when we
place the things emergently. He takes time to prep her skin very
carefully, then sets about numbing her up with studied
thoroughness. One of my classmates points out that the
painkiller isn't necessary, as Carmen is getting enough sedative
every hour to make any one of us sleep for days. The surgeon
looks up briefly, then goes back to work as if he hadn't heard.
He works quickly and efficiently, and gets the tube exactly
where we want it. He also meticulously re-bandages the other
chest tubes.
I've been trading patter with him throughout the process, and
with uncharacteristic bitterness he curses the poverty and ill
education which seem to coincide with IV drug use. We speculate
back and forth simplistically as to whether a stronger and more
coherent family life could prevent this sort of thing, and dream
up scenarios of parading kids from nearby high schools through
her room to convince them that it can happen to them.
Carmen now has six good-sized hoses radiating from her chest,
three on each side. The water seals gurgle to themselves
quietly, adding their commentary to the symphony of sound coming
from the assorted machinery which is keeping her alive.
I'm on call, and around eleven o'clock I wander into her room to
see how she's doing. To my complete and utter horror, she's
moving her arms and rolling her eyes in pure abject terror.
"Carmen, honey -- calm down. We're here. It'll be all right," I
say, at a loss for anything less trite. I call for the nurse,
and he rolls into the room with his trademark swift grin.
"I await your bidding, O wise one," he cracks, then stops cold
when he sees why I called him.
"Can we crank the sedative up to forty an hour?" I ask him.
"Yeah, no problem," he says, becoming pure efficient business
even as he adjusts the drip. He knows that he can't really take
orders from a medical student, but he also knows that neither
the resident nor the fellow will give him strife for doing the
Right Thing. Carmen is trying to talk to me as I stand there
holding her hand, but her words are voiceless because we've put
the tracheostomy tube where it belongs, below her vocal cords.
Still, I can make out what she's saying almost word for word,
and a wave of sympathetic anguish courses through me. The
increased dose of sedative takes effect, and she slips away from
us once again. We adjust the paralytics, and then I creep off to
stare at a blank expanse of wall, unseeing.
"Carmen woke up last night," I tell the team the next morning on
rounds. "She was trying to talk to me." I am strident and
depressed, speaking in short staccato sentences.
"This means she was probably light on sedative all day. It means
she probably felt every goddamned thing we did when we put that
chest tube in her. That what we were doing amounts to battery.
It also means," I stop and stare at each person on the team in
turn, "that she probably heard, and quite likely understood
everything that was said in her room yesterday."
My voice is thick. The chief touches her hand to my shoulder
quickly, and the Attending looks desperately unhappy.
"This is why," he says gently, "we shut the paralytics off
briefly every day. So we can ensure that our patients are
appropriately sedated." He doesn't need to say anything more.
A couple of afternoons later, the chief tells me to round up my
intern and resident and meet the team downstairs to look at
x-rays. I find them in the lab and drag them with me to the
radiology suite. There we are ten minutes later, wondering what
happened to the rest of the group. The entire intensive care
unit team is supposed to be reviewing this morning's films with
the Attending and the Fellow, but the three of us are the only
ones there. I try to page two different residents and get no
answer, which is most unusual; the internal medicine types here
tend to be pretty good about answering their beepers. They
steadfastly refuse to respond, though, and so I sit doodling on
the side of a metal rack with a grease pencil meant for marking
on radiographs.
In a fit of black humor I crack, "Maybe Carmen coded."
My intern grins quickly, then retorts with a vaguely worried
look. "Nah, we'd have heard 'em call it overhead."
Several interminable minutes later, we grow tired of waiting and
decide to venture back up to the unit to see what could have
delayed the rest of the team.
Sure enough, there are seven people in Carmen's room, and
someone's wheeling in the code-cart even as we arrive.
"Glory be," I think to myself, stunned. "Yesterday's addled
medical student is today's clairvoyant."
I step into the room to see one person bagging her, another
doing chest compressions, and two more -- one at each of her
inner thighs -- with long fat needles and very sharp knives.
They are probing with the needles deep in the fold of skin where
leg becomes groin, right at the edge of her pubic thatch. The
team needs large-bore vascular access, and they propose to put a
long snakey tube into one of her femoral veins. Their task is
complicated by the fact that every time the Fellow pushes on the
center of her chest, her whole body moves. Paradoxically they
need him to continue because his compressions are the only thing
that cause her femoral arteries to pulse, and they need to know
where the artery is if they're to find the vein that runs
alongside it.
Codes are dangerous. Obviously they portend Bad Things for the
patient, but they can also be actively unsafe for the medical
team. There's this crowd of very rushed people, many of whom are
wielding needles, scalpels and the like. One unexpected move and
someone other than the patient gets cut. These days that cut can
be a death sentence; there are lots of nasty infectious bugs
who'd love to have a nice relatively healthy host to grow in,
and they're all collected en masse on used cutting surfaces
hoping to jump ship.
This is the kind of code that never gets portrayed in television
medical dramas. You know how it works on TV: there's a person
with paddles in hand, punctuating the strident dialogue with
pulses of controlled electrical fire. The patient convulses
dramatically, and then wakes up to thank the team for their
heroic efforts.
Carmen's heart isn't in one of the shockable rhythms. The
paddles stay ensconced in their little electrified slots. We're
just pumping on her chest, getting good vascular access, and
giving her potent drugs. No one shouts out, "Clear!" or
pleadingly implores the patient, "Come on, damn you, don't
quit!" Instead it's the quiet urgency of folks trying to do
their part of the job, knowing full well that in this case it's
almost certainly a futile pursuit. There are no raised voices,
no desperate thumps on the chest. Just protocol.
Drugs get pushed, and everyone looks at the monitors. The House
Chief, who's directing the process, asks that CPR be suspended
momentarily to check for a pulse, and to everyone's
astonishment, there's one to be found. One of the residents is
counting out in clear high tones each time she feels it,
"Pulse-- pulse-- pulse--" We continue bagging her, forcing air
into her broken lungs with the blue squeeze bulb. We continue to
follow the prescribed protocol of drugs.
Carmen's heart is beating slowly but regularly and we're
starting to wonder if she might actually be able to pull out of
it. Then the resident who had found it to begin with announces,
"I've lost my pulse here." Ten heads swivel to look at the
electronic heart trace on the monitors and the House Chief
pauses for a second before she says, "Re-start CPR, please."
Thirty-five minutes later, we've run completely through the
algorithm, and continued considerably beyond it. In spite of
incredibly aggressive effort on our part, the numbers on the
monitor continue their downward trend, refusing to level off for
even a few moments.
"All right," the Chief says quietly. "Let's call it. Any
objections?" The room stands mute. We're done. We slowly step
away from the bed, reluctant to stop even though we know full
well that there's nothing more we can do.
Some time later, all the lines and tubes are removed and the
linens are changed. The curtains inside the huge transparent
panels which demarcate each room are drawn. I duck past the
curtain to step completely into the room and find that it's
totally unfamiliar in its absolute silence. No gurgling water
seals for the chest tubes, no crying sigh of the ventilator,
nothing. Just pure August sunlight pouring in through
plate-glass windows. There she is, calm, and I can think of
nothing. Her parents aren't going to come and see her before she
goes to the morgue. They only visited once while she was still
alive. Her dad tells us on the phone, "Nah... I saw plenty of
dead people in 'Nam."
I can see through the glass that it's a stunning day out. The
air is heavy and damp, and when I drive home I'll have to roll
up the window on my side of the car so neighborhood kids don't
drench me with water from the hydrant they've opened. There's
exquisite cold beer in my fridge. I take a last look at Carmen,
wordless, and step out of the room to finish up my afternoon.
Marcus Eubanks (eubanks@riotcentral.com)
------------------------------------------
Marcus Eubanks is an ER doc in a big hospital in Pittsburgh. His
stories have twice been selected to appear in eScene, the Best
of Net Fiction anthology at <http://www.escene.org/>.
The Smart Bomb by Richard K. Weems
======================================
....................................................................
You ever have one of those days?
....................................................................
Glasses perched atop my explosive warhead, I fold the morning
paper over itself and await still my morning brisket to reheat.
I wish ill things upon this toaster oven, with its sluggish
nature and lack of even the slightest sophistication. Still, I
will not have a microwave in the place -- such a false fear it
is, its radiation harmless though always trying to hum a facade
of disaster.
Roaches crawled about inside the door of the microwave I once
had (aptly named Norman). They thrive on those silly little
rays; they sprouted new legs and growths and clambered happy as
you will when the interior light came on.
The ones in uniform, milling about in the crawlspace just
outside my window, listening to me through devices taped up in
every niche of my little home, interrogating my discarded orange
rinds with microscopes for the residue of secrets that were
shredded when this project got started -- they are documenting
my every move.
07:45:38.2: removes glass, subsequently rubs eye.
07:45:43.1: looks down approx. 4.7 cm to left of left leg
to linoleum floor. (The spot there from last night's pasta?)
They chatter like insects, their proboscises clacking with
delicious regularity, when I make the slightest move contrary to
their computerized itinerary.
The news is the same every day -- hell, hand baskets, etc. I am
growing convinced that the newspapers are recycling the same
pictures using microbit technology. The smiles, for sure, look
all the same.
There is little more to do than await the completion of the
brisket and look out the window. A fine view -- I look out into
the steel box that encases my abode, its walls a little over a
foot from my window. The uniformed ones wriggle along with their
gadgets of measurement and detection. When they need to peek
through my window, they don plastic eyeglass frames with rubber
nose and bushy mustache attached. Either they don't want me to
be able to recognize them when I get out of here (and get out of
here I must, eventually -- what good is imprisonment without any
hope of release?) or the noses are some kind of olfactory
enhancement device used to confirm what can only be determined
by smell.
In any case, they're taking notes.
Every day there is also a visit from Dr. Corn -- a nice man with
a nice name, though prone to questions. His arrival is always
preluded by a buzz from the uniformed ones. They scatter from
sight when Dr. Corn opens the door to come in. Dr. Corn too dons
the false eyeglass/nose/mustache apparatus, though it seems to
create discomfort in him while he sets up the chessboard. He
always adjusts the apparatus as though it doesn't fit right.
"They haven't yet adjusted the arms on those things?" I sit back
and cross my arms the best I can over my cylindrical chest.
"Standard issue," replies Dr. Corn. Self-consciously, he pushes
on the end of his nose.
"I could probably take a stab at it myself," I say. As small and
scrawny as my hands are -- not designed for any kind of heavy
manual labor, apparently -- they are quite useful for glasses.
Instinctually, I seem to know that I would be good at opening
small doors, letting myself in through relatively small hatches,
disengaging alarms.
"That would be wonderful," Dr. Corn says, a slight smile as he
studies the board, though a move hasn't been made yet. "But I'm
afraid I'd never find the same pair again. They pile them all
into a bin we're supposed to take from on our way in." He then
immediately looks about in a worrisome manner, as if he might
have revealed more than he was supposed to.
The phone rings. I am hesitant to answer. It is always some
mathematical formula they want me to solve, or a voice quiz they
want me to respond to.
Since Dr. Corn is here, I decide to comply and I pick up the
receiver. A prerecorded voice tells me:
Assess and transfer graded simulation, in order of security
necessity, the following items:
-- F-22 modeling/simulation and test concept development
-- Joint Advanced Distributed Simulation (JADS) Joint Test
(JT) support
-- Electronic Combat (EC) OT&E test concept assessment and
development support for B-1 DSUP, F-22, B-2, and F-15 TEWS
-- Nuclear survivability support for MILSTAR and Global
Positioning System
-- B-2 Data Reduction and Analysis System (DRAS) development
and implementation
-- Automated Software Evaluation Tool Set (ASETS) development
and implementation
-- Air Force Operational and Logistics Information Systems
(IS) test planning and execution support
-- Cheyenne Mountain Upgrade (CMU) OT&E planning and execution
Just to get them away, I tell them all I know, the words coming
out more by rote, it seems, though I'm sure I've never spoken
them in that order.
Funny: Do memories have footnotes?
Then, as always, comes the series of questions, all 163,482 of
them, asked in that same monotonic manner, the long sequence of
stuttering tones with which I answer in kind, answering their
queries again in nanoseconds flat.
"Most adequate," says Dr. Corn. He moves a pawn, to his
misfortune. I see victory in 36 moves.
I begin my assault. "A wonder how often they forget all that," I
say. I wonder for a moment, as Dr. Corn makes his next,
predictable move, if I should offer the poor man some sympathy,
a chance to extend the game a bit further for fun's sake, but
this idea is consumed immediately by a series of fail-safes and
lockouts.
I will beat Dr. Corn in 34 moves. Now 33.
Dr. Corn advances a bishop. 32. "They forget nothing,
Beauregard, my son." (Such an endearing term, this, and it gives
me pause.) "They are merely testing you." 31.
"And why do they continue to test me..." 30. "...when I get it
all right every time?" 29. 28. 27. 26, 25. 24. 23. This must be
a good question to keep him preoccupied so long. He takes a
moment to choose his words before he makes a studied, brilliant
posture -- impressive, though futile. 22.
"They must know that you can give the information in a moment's
notice," he says. 21. He makes his move (20) with prideful
deliberation. 19. "They must know that at any time, any given
moment, all your circuits are intact and ready to carry out your
orders." There is a hint of futility now, and now we're down to
18. Now 17. It must be tough for him to keep a raised chin as I
bang out moves that counter his thoughtful constructions.
He ponders again. 16. 15, now. He deliberates before 14, his
finger pressing on the top of his poor, doomed knight's head for
a good, full breath before lifting it. No more knight: 13.
"But there is nothing to forget," I offer. "My memory sits in
one place at all times, in the corner of my sight, it seems,
useless until I'm given orders to retrieve it, and then it rolls
out by no will of my own, a stream I can only sit back and watch
as it flows exactly as it has every time before. I can't see
where any errors would occur in such a system." 12. 11. Dr. Corn
shakes his head -- he's become far too much into his game. Like
the other times I beat him decisively, he is taking it all too
personally. This is just a game, after all. Perhaps what bothers
him is that I hold no respect for him as an adversary.
"We must be sure, Beauregard," he says, studying the board for
some hope of escape. The only one he has is the only one I
allow. 10 and 9.
"You don't test the toaster oven," I accuse. "Damned thing. I'm
nowhere near a brisket right now, and I starve."
"Patience, patience." Dr. Corn is far from consoling.
8. 7.
They have no power over me. This realization is clear and
shuttering. A million circuits become available to me, switches
and digits the uniformed ones and Dr. Corn hoped I'd never see.
All the same, I understand their fear, understand their reasons
for holding so much back, all this power I can feel brimming
inside of me. I pity them.
Dr. Corn cannot have seen the change in me. He sways not an inch
form his posture of near-defeat-but-not-giving-up. What an image
of him it will be to have burned into my memory. 6, with 5 right
behind.
"All in due time," Dr. Corn mutters.
He has no idea.
4. 3.
Richard K. Weems (weemsr@loki.stockton.edu)
---------------------------------------------
Richard K. Weems is a writer out of southern New Jersey. His
work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Pif Magazine and
elsewhere. Occasionally, he can be found on the FM airwaves,
making a lot of noise in honor of his father.
The Waterspout by Redmond James
===================================
....................................................................
A man, a woman, an apartment.
And a spider.
....................................................................
1.
----
He was large, boris was, right from the day he walked on all
quavering eights into our lives. I'd never cared for them. Large
spiders, that is. I'd been victim, since birth or before, to
what one somber pre-teen specialist had termed a "primal
aversion," this specialist being of the school that _phobia_ was
a term apt to debilitate its bearer, particularly when hastily
applied at a tender age. My father forthwith -- against the
advice of this professional and the stout objections of my
mother -- went out and purchased a medium-sized tarantula, which
he placed in my hands as I sat at the kitchen table. And there I
held it, for a period of one hour, on seven successive evenings.
On the eighth evening my father killed it, dropped the hairy,
mangled carcass into the tall kitchen trash can, and proclaimed:
"That's that."
He was divorced by my mother one year later, although I can't
say with any true certainty whether these kitchen sessions had
much, if anything, to do with it. It would have been one year to
the day, this divorce, had 1976 not been a leap year.
The small ones -- again, I mean spiders -- I've mistrusted just
as keenly as the large. This despite their limited size, or
perhaps because of it. Small spiders are fleeter of foot and, I
don't know... _sneakier_ somehow, fuller of the sort of mischief
that's likely to end up as a bite on your finger, involving
swelling, stitches, necrosis. Amputation, maybe. They fidget and
scamper at the first sign of trouble, at the slightest little
disturbance.
You can keep your eye on the big ones. We did.
I hate cliche very much. I do. We named the spider Boris.
Convenience, as I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, provides
a frequent and powerful counterweight to most kinds of
prejudice, taste, morality, blah-blah. And I guess the girl had
a vote, too. She saw him first.
"I don't know about you sometimes," the girl said.
It was a Monday night, that much I remember. Not even dark yet,
and much too early in the week for her to be already not knowing
about me. Oh boy, I thought, and here we go.
"If you're thinking about raising the subject of Katy's
wedding," I said, "that conversation is over."
"So you'll decide when conversations are over?" she said.
"That's good," she said. "Send in the grown-ups."
I didn't say a thing. Not another thing. And as I was being
proud of myself for resisting the bait, I began slowly to be
ashamed of myself for considering it that. Resisting, I thought.
Is that what we're supposed to be proud of on our Monday
evenings? It was perhaps in the spirit of such gloomy
self-reproach that I got up off the couch and went to Martha,
who had repaired, hufflike, to the balcony.
My intention upon rising was to put my arms around her waist as
she stood at the rail, to extend the familiar calumet whose
precise message had never been clearly defined in three years of
togetherness and three months of sharing a roof. At times I
guessed the offering to be many things -- concession short of
apology, pardon minus absolution, comfort without verdict -- and
perhaps the ambiguous nature of this frequent gesture might have
been considered a symptom, if not a yardstick, of the lightly
submerged ambiguity of our general situation. My intention, at
any event, was to place arms about her waist from behind, drop
my head to her shoulder, and gaze over the backyard trees while
calm breathing and perhaps sensible thought found its way back
into our pressed-together bodies. I stepped out onto the balcony
and paused, awaiting my chance, but Martha had the kitchen rug
out over the rail, and was abusing it with profound and
unrelenting vengeance. When the dust began to tickle my nose, I
went back inside.
Martha eventually followed me in, but she didn't replace the rug
in the kitchen. Instead, she draped it over the back of a chair
so that her hands could be on her hips when she said:
"It's the fact that you won't even talk about it."
"I will talk," I said. "It's only that I won't have the _same_
talk about it over and over again. If there's going to be
something new about it, we'll talk about it again."
"She's one of my oldest friends."
"You've mentioned that."
"She's only going to have one wedding."
"I'd adopt a wait-and-see stance on that one," I said, and we
were off and talking about it again.
Our apartment, at that time, was like most others leased in
Atlanta to people just starting out. With kitchen, bath and bed,
there were five rooms altogether, if you counted the balcony as
a room, which believe me, we quickly did. Such a layout is nice
in winter months, when the timid central unit doesn't have much
airspace to contend with in spreading its warmth. But it has its
downside, let me assure you, when other manners of heat arise,
and you feel the scarcity of airspace then, too.
"Why can't you do this for me?"
"If you're going to have a sudden wedding," I said, rubbing my
face slowly and deeply, and not for effect, "You have to expect
to pay the price in attendance. Who ever heard of a six-week
engagement?"
"It doesn't change the fact that I should go."
"Go," I said. "You probably should. But _that_ doesn't change
the fact that I have one, count it, one vacation day to last me
the next seven months."
Martha made a noise, up into the air of our small living room. I
heard it over my shoulder; she was perched now, hands very
likely still on hips, in the narrow space that joined our living
room to our bedroom to our kitchen, a snatch of carpet that in a
generous moment an unscrupulous realtor had once called a hall.
The carpet masked the sound of her foot tapping, if her foot was
in fact doing so, as it was in my picture of the girlfriend
behind me, hands on hips.
I am a creature who takes to staring when I cannot walk away; a
long unbroken gaze is my number two recourse mechanism. I am not
a fighter, but neither am I a wall-starer, and for these reasons
I took at this moment to the window, and thus, by default, to
Boris.
Unbidden squatter of our living room's sole window, Boris the
spider met my gaze from the still center of his small universe
and looked back at me with interest, or he didn't. Only he knows
for sure.
Boris had by now been with us for a week. He was as much a part
of our place and our life as other trivial unexpectations that
found their way into our home from time to time and lingered
thereafter: leaky faucet, single mudprint, unopened mail. I had
noticed his web one morning before work, and in the time it
required to take my shower and affix the day's neckwear, Boris
had risen from his slumber and assumed what was to become his
daily lookout.
Situated with prominence and disregard, Boris commanded an
enviable view of the property. He had shown what I considered
both singular arrogance and admirable cunning in choosing his
spot. As he sat fat and prim on his roost in our window, he was
at once the proud, consummately visible centerpiece of our
limited view, and the safest tenant in the entire building.
Defended on one flank by the glass, on the other by the screen,
this interloper finally -- and crucially -- enjoyed the ultimate
security of his host's previously-mentioned, debilitating
phobia. Martha shared her fellow host's terror. She promptly
grimaced, and named him Boris.
"We're not keeping him," I said, to this naming.
But Martha, frocked in the white of her hospital lab coat, had
already assumed the privilege of the glass wall's protection,
and despite her fear, was peering in close and curious.
"But he followed us home," Martha said.
When she tapped on the glass with her fingernail and smiled at
the shimmy this effected in the creature, I began to suspect
that her fear was a superficial thing, a thing perhaps confessed
out of kindness in the midst of some past, forgotten
spider-crisis, to make my unmanliness less compelling.
And so for a week we had watched our Boris, and so I watched him
now. His big spider legs were placed with careful precision,
each extended in perfect protracted symmetry to display the
quiet beast's full magnificence. He was smaller than the
tarantula of my youth, I reflected tonight, but he was a
different breed, a sleeker model, and if you added a coat of fur
and a modest spare tire to his abdomen, he could have been a
rival. And, I noticed tonight, he was growing.
There was quiet above and around me; Boris commanded my field of
vision.
"Is this a stand you're taking with me?" she said, behind me.
"Add something new if that's what's keeping you quiet."
I watched the spider's reaction, which was nothing at all. I
wondered if he heard us through the spotless safety glass.
"Or is it maybe," the voice behind me wondered, "is it just that
you're afraid of weddings?" She wrung her hands, I thought, if
such things make a sound. "Are you _that_ anti-marriage?"
I rubbed my face without taking my eyes off the web in the
window, and it was a good long moment before I answered.
"We're going to have to do something about this Boris," I said.
2.
----
Let it be known that I never trusted Boris; although he never
gave offense outside of his very presence, I think any glimpse
into my youth is enough to explain my misgivings. I was under
the impression, for two days at least, that it was this inborn
or inbred bigotry that accounted for the careful eye I kept on
the spider, until on Wednesday afternoon as I sat gazing at the
web, the truth of the matter dawned clear as a bell: I was
waiting for him to eat something.
Would he wrap his victim in sticky thread, I wondered, once my
mind had been made aware of my purpose and cleared to wonder.
Would Boris take great relish in the slow art of secreting his
deadly entangling lines, sinister glee in their gradual,
painstaking application to the still-breathing, terrified meal,
eyes wide and paralyzed in his web? How long would he wait to
sink his fangs, inject the fatal kiss of his venom? How long
would he dance about the corpse, then gloat over his dinner
before the grisly ritual of final consumption slowly began?
"Eat, you monster," I said to the glass, inches from my face.
"You're not fooling anyone."
When I came in from work on Thursday the blinds were down, but
only on the one window and for some reason this perturbed me.
Martha's lab coat was draped over the arm of the couch. I walked
to the window and drew the blinds to mid-level, exposing Boris.
He seemed fatter since this morning, but there were no crumbs on
his plate, no napkin. He sat very still at center-web.
"Did you drop the blinds?" I called to the other room, which
produced Martha, who mimicked my voice with impressive skill as
she appeared.
"How was your day, dear?" and she clucked her tongue, stood
there.
We had lasagna for dinner -- my favorite and hers -- and the
meal was quiet except for when it was loud. A two-volume
standard is dangerous in apartment dwelling, Boris, I thought in
the general direction of the window.
It gets like that sometimes, Boris thought back at me and I
grimaced at him. You think you're so smart, I thought, and let
it go at that.
Of course I didn't offer Boris any of the lasagna, but I thought
perhaps I might, him thinking he was so clever and all. There, I
could say to him, watching him chew. That's what a favorite meal
can taste like when mention is made of a friend's
fast-approaching wedding at some point between the pouring of
the wine and the passing of the Parmesan. The fact that the
mention is not, as it may turn out, about this pre-doomed topic,
but about something entirely unrelated, and yet still resultant
in the bi-volume tenor of the atmosphere, dear Boris, I could
say, makes the dish all the more bland, as you can see.
Eat, Boris, if that makes you grow. Try, while you're at it, to
remember the love beneath it all, remember how much you love
your meal, remember why you built your web here in the first
place. Eat and remember and try not to cry, friend. And keep the
talking to a minimum, by all means.
3.
----
We went to dinner that Saturday night at Pano's downtown, and
had a very nice evening, as we are very capable of doing. It's a
night like this, Martha said after we had danced one number and
started a slow second, that makes me wonder why either one of us
would want to do anything else. It was true that we were having
a very nice time, and in a way, in the way she had put it, she
was absolutely right, so I smiled and didn't say anything. Slow
numbers allow the quiet anonymity of long gazes over the
shoulder, and I didn't know if she was waiting for an answer or
if we were just still dancing. Back at the table, anyhow, I
asked if she'd like another drink and she said let's have one at
home, and I smiled and she smiled.
At home I opened the champagne -- a six-dollar variety that
feels at ease in our refrigerator -- and poured two glasses in
the kitchen and brought them to the couch. We sipped and kissed
for a while, and she smiled after each small kiss and I was
careful to taste the soft, dry tingles of the champagne that
lingered in each corner and wrinkle of her lips. We sat with our
heads together and gazed at where the log fire would have burned
low in a nicer apartment than ours, and when I felt her breath
come close in my ear I turned on the couch and we kissed for
real. We made love sitting up, Martha in my lap with her soft
small legs folded back on top of mine. She moved very slowly,
rising and settling and I held close to the backs of her
shoulders and kept our cheeks pressed gently into each other. We
ended together, with little more than a sigh and a gasp -- one
of each -- and I knew the source of neither. Her chin and her
face in my neck, we sat that way for a long time.
Her breathing settled in and became soft, regular after a while,
and I smelled her hair, pushing a bit of it out of my eyes.
Across the room, Boris the spider was crawling slowly, picking a
meticulous path from the center of his world down along one of
its many rays; I watched his progress over the rim of my
champagne flute.
"He transfixes you," the girl whispered in my ear. I didn't say
anything and then she said, "Are you looking at the spider?"
"Boris is going to bed," I said. Then, "I've noticed you
watching him, too."
"I can see him in the mirror," Martha whispered. "Right now. But
it's only just motion."
Still she sat on my lap and still I held her. It was warm in the
small apartment.
"He's our pet," I said. "And we don't feed him."
"He's very happy."
"I hope so."
"He's our pet," she said.
4.
----
I will admit the truth: He transfixed me. Us. She was just as
guilty, and she watched him as I did.
Who can say why certain things capture us? Maybe it's nothing
more than a simple matter of what is thrust in front of us. And
he was that, Boris, full in our face. After a while the
existence of our spider began leading away from curiosity and
into the more serious realms of preoccupation: fixation, a
pre-teen specialist might say, and I would be inclined to agree
with him. As the weekend bled into Monday and Tuesday, I noticed
that my ponderings at the window were steeped more in feeling
than in thought. It seemed to me, as the new week took shape,
that we were drawn back to the window not so much by the extreme
close-up of nature and savagery anymore, but by the binding
curiosity of people who habitually tune in. We are programmed --
in the womb, I'm convinced -- with a deep unending hunger for
what happens next. What would be our spider's fate?
Through it all, or through most of it, I thought, even in the
naming of him and the fanciful conferment of his pet-hood, we
both wanted him gone. Glass or no glass, I keep the demons of my
youth dear and close at hand. But still... he _was_ ours. It was
our spider trapped in there, and he had chosen us in the first
place, hadn't he? He could have gone anywhere. Even as the days
passed and he started looking weak -- he still had shown
evidence of neither crumb nor napkin -- he was still ours and
wasn't it better that he be our dying Boris than lost somewhere
out in the strange, big world, away and alone?
But still, still, on the other hand... What's one to think when,
upon stopping by for coffee or to borrow a cup of sugar, one
chances to glance at the window and notice a three-inch arachnid
holding brazen, uncontested court? I was conscious that the
fallout of such could be particularly traumatic for a
housekeeper, as Martha -- though she put in sixty hours more
often than forty at the downtown hospital -- had titled herself.
And this, in effect, is what really put the ball in motion, I'm
sorry to say.
We had known about the party since well before Boris' time. The
six couples we knew, more or less, or nodded to at the pool or
had dinner with once or twice, had marked their calendars and
would be spending one Saturday evening with us, and this coming
up was the Saturday. With the two... with the _three_ of us. And
this is the thought that struck Martha just in time, hard, on
Thursday afternoon.
"There's going to be a spider in our window," she said, rather
clinically, by my appraisal. "For the party."
It ends, was my first thought, tinged with light regret; surely
no prominent sitting spider, however ferocious or dear, could
expect to withstand the dawning of this terror. I thought, well,
that's it, the enchantment is over, and maybe it would have
been, but for the fact that our mutual distaste for close
negotiations with eight-legged things remained in fast effect.
This was the second thought, which oddly soothed me, and when it
dawned on Martha soon thereafter, it caused her to pace and pace
and pace.
I suggested that we draw the blinds for the party.
"That would look ridiculous," she said.
And then the idea struck. Not brilliance, perhaps, but a good
showing of ingenuity in the face of acknowledged personal
limitation, I thought. Of course, yes, I liked the idea more the
longer I held it in front of me, unlike my father's tarantula.
It was too good to pass up, and moreover, imperative not to,
given the state of our phobias. Laugh at your baldness, my
father had told me at a distressingly early age, particularly in
front of your buddies. Because you're going to be bald, son, and
you won't be able to hide it from anyone.
Of course. We'd get someone drunk at the party. Take on the big
spider. You man enough to open that window? You man enough? Come
on, tough guy like you. Drunk guts, we used to call it.
As Saturday arrived and aged and began to fade into its
inevitable twilight, we dusted, we spread the table, put out
napkins and toothpicks, vacuumed twice, at least, and we did not
draw the shade. As the preparations wound down and the fridge
door rattled with each bottle-laden reopening, as the lights
came up and the pillows were arranged on the couch for the
backsides of our friends, I avoided the window and was reluctant
to meet Boris eye to eye.
My thoughts were fixed on Trevor Nayback, stocky and athletic,
advertising guy with a big laugh, my prime candidate for
Liberator. He was forever challenging and re-challenging me to
tennis and "hoops" and backgammon, a boaster when victorious, a
back-slapper when he lost. Trevor with the big laugh reveled in
his malehood such that I figured spiders would be no trouble for
him, perhaps even a particular delight, some remnant glimmer of
glee from a boyhood spent reveling in his malehood. Upon his
arrival I greeted him with a large smile and an arm around his
shoulder that made me feel like an old ad man myself.
Of course he and Cindy arrived first, and of course I said
nothing about Boris, but after the rest of the arrivals and
three or four rounds of expensive, green-bottled Dutch beer and
music and the grilling of the bratwurst and hamburg and a few
more green bottles all around and more laughs and a consistent
incline of general merriment, all he would say, upon the big
revelation and the focus of the room's collective attention on
the small window and its big trophy, was: "Jesus."
"That's a spider," he added, moments later, as punctuation, or
to announce that he'd retrieved his breath.
"You're not afraid of a spider, are you Trevor?" Martha baited,
as I prepared to take voluble offense to this on his behalf.
"Jesus," he was laughing, and going back into the kitchen for
another beer.
He made fine conversation, did Boris. Exceptional, really; his
introduction elevated what had heretofore been a humdrum party.
He gave good squeal, and even danced a few numbers when
prompted, which was frequent; hands not holding green-bottled
beer had a habit of finding the glass for a curious tap. The joy
was such over this unique diversion that I stepped back for a
moment and just watched it. Curious eyes, little smiles, and as
I've mentioned, I believe, squeals. Look at him crawl, and where
did he come from, and how long, did you say? My good gracious. I
began to wonder, as this circus played, about these people and
their pets, and I began to wonder, with all this glee, why it
was that more people didn't go out and buy spiders for
themselves. Why did it seem that only loners and crazy people
kept snakes in big aquariums, fed them mice and watched them
eat? Snakes were being mis-marketed, somehow, to the
marginal
characters who lived in basements or with their parents or both,
and why? They'd be such hits at parties.
But no, I reminded myself, there's more to it than just parties.
Snakes and spiders are monsters and enemies, freaks, they belong
to loners who don't mind a lifetime and a kinship spent looking
through glass. Dogs and cats are what's for normal people.
But for the evening, for our gala, the nice folks delighted in
our good Boris. They even began, at Martha's devious prompting,
to wonder about the glass, the real necessity for it, you know?
But proud Trevor Nayback was stout in his position when the
challenge was hinted around, laughed over, taken up as
entertainment, and finally laid down.
"Come on, tough monkey," I laughed.
He shook his stubby head.
"Your spider," he said, drunk, but no guts. "Your problem."
I called him all sorts of names, a tack to which he is
particularly vulnerable, but no joy. Others joined the fun,
seeing my strategy, wondering loudly what kind of man he could
profess to be, sacred of a little spider and all. He was
laughing through it all, and then the tide of challenge turned
to Nathan Farb, a virgin accountant from the other building,
slight of build and given to fits of almost girlish giggles. He
demurred so emphatically that I suspected the room had turned on
him just to see what, if any, emphatics were hiding in this
little creature. Satisfied, and perhaps a bit alarmed, the
temptations turned back to steadfast, burly Trevor.
It had started raining just after dark, lightly at first, but
then it picked up, and by now was coming in memorable fashion.
It was hard night rain, solid and loud against the roof, the
kind that makes you feel like there's no one else out there. As
the beer disappeared and the laughter grew louder inside our
bright, isolated cocoon, I started to fear that somehow Trevor
would summon the courage or fall victim to the bravado and make
a move on the spider. He would trap Boris in a cup, certainly,
and with a daring bolt to the door, would cast the spider into
the maw of this ferocious night, whereupon my great fear would
be realized, and the mighty wind would catch the thrown spider
and blow him back into our apartment before the door could be
slammed and the party could resume. Screams would result, and a
general scattering, and when peace was restored, we'd be stuck
with a ruined party and a renegade and at-large Boris, casting
about invisibly on the dangerous side of the window glass and
none too pleased at having had the peace of his evening and his
world so very much upended.
I let up immediately on the name-calling.
The party settled when it became clear that the spider would not
be dislodged. Still, talk came back to him, petering off
somewhat, until it came at about the rate of the
now-only-occasional taps on the window.
"How did he get in there?" asked Gina from downstairs, after a
tap and a smile, it seemed to me, of appreciation when Boris
refused to shimmy.
"How do pests get anywhere?" answered Robert, beloved of Gina,
and I laughed.
"My theory," answered Martha, looking at me as I laughed, "is
that he was just a baby when he stumbled inside and made what he
thought was a good home, but then he got too big to get back
out."
I didn't stop my laughter but when it was over, which wasn't
long, the smile did not linger on my face. Martha's eyes were
still on me, just so, and just like that, I wanted another beer.
I went for it. As I opened the fridge and rummaged through what
was left, I knew almost immediately that I didn't want that
beer. What I wanted, and I felt it more than knew it, felt it
very deeply, was for the party to be over and for it to be
tomorrow, without the interim having to be gone through, the
quiet clank of clean-up and just us there with Boris and no
party anymore.
Out in the living room, someone else had tapped the glass. I
heard it over my shoulder.
"Well, then," this someone else pondered, "if he's so hungry
now, and it really looks like he is, what was he eating all
along in there that got him so fat?"
"That's a very good question," Martha said.
5.
----
It was Monday morning when the flyer went around at work. I
guess, cradling the benefit of aftersight, it couldn't have come
at a worse time, but nonetheless, my copy of dull corporate
mimeograph stationary arrived at my desk before I did, and
alerted me to the imminence of the jovial, light-spirited, and
all-but-compulsory company picnic. As a rule, I am not a fan of
such corporate joviality, to say nothing of my stand on
compulsion, but I am a dutiful attendee. I am responsible and
slowly becoming a grown-up, with all that this entails,
kowtowing not excluded.
And fool that I am, I brought this newsflash home with me, if
not the actual flyer, and broached the subject with, again I am
here referring to my crystal-coated, post-dated gift of insight,
remarkably dim-witted expediency.
"The company picnic?" the girl said with deceptively soft
incredulity. She didn't say 'you've got to be kidding me,' but
of course she didn't need to. The three words she _had_ spoken
said it clearly enough, and I immediately cowered, suddenly
keenly aware of my bluntness of bearing.
Martha had enjoyed a taxing Monday of her own, and certainly the
likeliness of this hadn't figured into my planning either, if,
indeed, anything else had.
"I don't expect you to come," I said weakly, knowing it was too
late for even weakness of voice to bail me out. "I was just
saying is all. They're having it."
"The fact that you would even ask me," Martha said, warming up,
warming loud. "Just that you could say it with a straight face."
And off we were.
In my recognition of stupidity, I adopted what I thought was a
conciliatory, or at the very least, retreating manner, and I was
exceedingly willing to let the matter drop, and perhaps it was
this feeling of surrender at the outset that caused me to warm
to the offensiveness of her _not_ letting it drop, and allowed
this spark of misstep to blossom into the healthy conflagration
it quickly became. 'I said I was sorry' was the thought that
propelled me deeper into my burgeoning combative spirit, even
though I was pretty sure I hadn't, actually, or literally.
Of course the subject of impending nuptials in far-off lands
arose rather handily, and the comparison of earlier
conversations of same to what I had just dim-wittedly proposed,
and at the first mention of this, my cornered eye sought the
refuge of our trophy in the window. I beheld Boris from across
the room, his peculiar shape hoisted dead still in the center of
the intricate web, and I remembered, and wondered yet again, at
what a spark he had infused into our drab weekend party. What
fun and excitement, what curiosity and theorizing, what dull
trouble. I gazed at the window without seeing him, only thinking
and wondering.
It had been Cindy Nayback, of all people, who stood longest at
the window, a thoughtful finger holding her chin in place, quiet
for a change. It was Cindy whom I had approached as she stood in
such reflection, and Cindy, of all people, who had turned to me
with sadness in her eyes, a solemnity quite sobering amid the
squawk and giggle that otherwise stormed in the room regarding
the object of her apparent concern.
"Fear not," I smiled to her, beer in hand. "Trevor is holding
firm about not adopting the beast."
"It's tragic," she said to me, and Cindy Nayback's face
certainly said tragic.
"What's this?" I said, ever the happy face, ever curious.
"His whole little world," she sighed. "Doesn't this strike you
as sad? Look at his web, and the beauty of it, and all the care
he took. Doesn't it seem a tragedy for it all to go to waste?"
"He's living in his mansion," I pointed out.
"But so what?" she protested. "It's an empty mansion. What's the
use of building something so beautiful between a window on one
side, and a screen on the other? It may look pretty to us, but
what good is it to him?"
I thought about that then, and I thought about it now. What
good, indeed? I wondered -- and hoped, a little bit -- if maybe
Boris got out at night. If he walked along the waterspout
outside the window cruising flies, if he snuck across the carpet
to the kitchen and made use of our fridge. If somehow he wasn't
enjoying his stay, thriving perhaps, and living not solely for
the amusement of his hosts and their occasional drunken window-
tappers.
It was thoughts such as these that gave rise to my protest when
the beer-laden crowd, thinned out a bit since the passing of
midnight, began to wax philosophical, and the squeals of
spider-fright had given way to considerations of our Boris'
overall well-being. Martha was of the status-quo camp.
"He's safe," she said to the couch group. "What more can an
animal of the wild wish for? From behind the window, he can
watch the world and it can't touch him."
"But he's trapped," I heard my voice raised, elevated to cut
through the nods of agreement. "Nice view from the web, but he
can't touch anything."
Martha looked at me and shrugged, and so did most of the others
who lingered, it seemed. This was the part of the evening I had
wished to skip past, and yet here I was, talking loud to be
heard.
It seemed odd to me then, but such perhaps is the odd way of the
world, that two such similar statements could not only sound,
but actually be, so dissimilar. Weren't we, someone pointed out,
in effect saying the same thing, and arguing not over the
consequences of the situation, but over what there was to look
for in a situation itself? Sure, I had said. That sounds like
about it.
"I don't believe you can sit there and even ask me to come to
some company picnic after the way you've exposed your
unwillingness to participate in my life," Martha said. Exposed
my unwillingness, I thought. Is that what I'd done? "I can't
believe you're going yourself," she continued, snapping out each
word like a little hook with no discernible barb, "with the way
you cherish your vacation days."
The picnic was going to be held on a Saturday, as is every
picnic that is not held on a Sunday, and I figured she realized
this, of course, but still, I almost had to mention it. Instead
of mentioning it, however, I yelled.
"Just say no!" I belted, standing, turning in her direction but
directing the command at my feet, an arm held out in emphasis.
"Just say no and that's that. That'll be the end of it. I asked
you a yes or no question, and that's all I want. Say no and
we'll stop talking."
Martha was quiet for a moment as I stood with my head down and
my stop hand still held forward. I'm a smart enough man to know
it was a dangerous quiet. Martha took a small step toward me and
folded her arms, if they hadn't been folded already.
"You're too selfish to even see that you're selfish," she said,
soft now but with an edge to it.
"That's more syllables than I was looking for."
"Listen to you, goddammit," she yelled. "You're too wrapped up
in your own little world for it to occur to you that you're not
even a _subtle_ hypocrite. You could at least try to be subtle
about it."
"If you want to go, I'll check the box," I said, without a
single notion of why I still held onto this, "and there'll be
enough potato salad for you. If not, I'll check the other box.
They're just looking for a commitment from who's coming and
who's not."
"Commitment?" She stressed the word so hard that it shattered
like a single syllable of crystallized outrage. "You want that
from me? You're too afraid of commitment to even let a spider
live in peace."
"What?" I looked up now, flushed full, I felt my eyes wild. This
was genuine bafflement, with which I don't fare well. I repeated
myself, as I do in such cases.
"The party," Martha said, dragging into this mess our little
Boris, the solitary unified link between we two, of late. "You
wanted him out."
"Out?" I said, and repeated. "Out? We both wanted him out. We
both said..."
"You went nuts about it," Martha cried. "He's fine there and you
like him there and you still went nuts about getting him out."
This was beyond me, but things being beyond me and racing past
my grasping arms rarely stops me from flailing wild hands and
shouting my curses as they zing by.
"That spider should be out in the world," I yelled. "Living,
mating, not sitting here distracting us. He's got to be about
the most ridiculous spider in the world. Other spiders laugh at
him, I know they do. Sometimes I hear it."
I promise you this, I wasn't laughing, and Martha didn't seem
any more likely to do so than I. And it didn't slow her down,
nor me, this spider-laughter from off in the rain gutters or the
trees or the dark corners of my dementia, wherever sneering
rivals lurked. We yelled blindly onward, it came fast and easy
now.
"What's wrong with Boris?" she wanted to know. "He's got his web
and his fortress. He can see out in any direction."
"He's trapped," I answered. "What good is his web?"
"He's safe from wind and rain and..."
"He'll starve!" I screamed, pounding the glass.
And I saw her eyes on the window, below where the butt of my
hand had struck it, and I turned to look at what she was seeing.
And that's when we noticed, yes, it was true. To the summons of
this most thunderous of all window-thumpings, our stout guardian
of the window and the web offered no reaction. The glass still
rattled, and the silk mesh vibrated in silence beyond, and in
the middle, our reduced black housemate remained inert and
unharried, swaying only with the faint reverb as his perch
settled to. When the storm had subsided, one black leg hung free
from its handle, and with the most concentrated, most laborious
and slow-motion effort I have ever felt the agony of witnessing,
this dangling leg braced and steadied its weight in precarious
balance, then hoisted itself, trembling, to its previous point
of attachment. We stared at the obvious, struggling truth spread
before us, and she didn't have anything to say to that.
He _was_ starving, or worse.
I had just been trying to win the argument. Now we were faced
with this.
"We have to yell, for this," I said quietly, before I really
knew what I was saying, or what, if anything, I meant. The voice
felt funny in my throat, unraised. It felt like nothing more
than breathing after what had come before.
We stared at the glass and didn't say anything, and I remember
noting, even as the moments passed between us, that we didn't
look at each other. We kept our eyes on the glass and we
probably sighed or panted or took turns doing both, and when
finally I leaned back down and tapped the glass again, Martha
said, "Don't wake him."
It sounded like something one would say of a child, a
dear-darling little trooper who was tuckered out and whose ice
cream would wait until morning. As such, I ignored it, thinking
too with some annoyance that Martha was refusing to see the real
difficulty here. I leaned in very close and watched the aging
spider. His retrieved limb clung weakly to where it had managed
to regain its grip. Nothing moved. I tapped the glass with the
end of one finger, hoping, just perhaps. I frowned and tapped.
Tapped it again. Rapped it with knuckles.
6.
----
In the morning, well... It was as we expected. Through the misty
blue haze of the window's western exposure, it was clear that
Boris' late withdrawal, at some time after our own departure for
bed, had not been of his own design. The web had been vacated
and was clear of all obstruction, save the single black leg that
had been so painstakingly lifted and reapplied in the final
struggle of our late pet. The frightful appendage did not dangle
free, but had enmeshed itself within several strands of the web
itself, presumably during the last gasp and fall that had
deposited the balance of the spider in the bottom of the inner
sill. My eyes followed the likely path of descent and came to
rest on a balled-up, thoroughly pitiful shell of blackness
directly beneath the leg and the window lock.
Martha came to the window and stood beside me, and I felt her
gaze joined with mine upon the remains of our strange and much
embattled houseguest. Despite our attachment, and the austere
sobriety with which we now attended this anticipated revelation,
I stood there not knowing, and in honest truth, doubting,
whether either one of us would be enough of a grown-up to open
the window and dispose of him properly.
I left the window first, and Martha shortly followed, and as we
moved in the kitchen and the bathroom, retrieved the
Journal-Constitution from outside the door and settled into the
silent commencement rituals of our Tuesday, I thought it both
odd and entirely predictable that a word had still not passed
between us. In the queerly easy silence I thought I could still
detect the raised and angry voices of last night singing in the
shadows that resisted the arriving day. It was this chorus, I
reflected, this screaming that had driven us to take our first
intelligent look at the spider situation in a long time, the
screaming that had shown us how far gone the poor guy really
was.
I heard the tap turn and the water start to run in the bathroom,
then the hiss and low scream of the shower and then the rattle
and splatter of Martha's displacement in the stream. I went back
to the window and gazed, not down into the sill, but out through
the web and into dawning day. No, I thought now. It hadn't been
the screaming so much that had made us think. Thought had lurked
long beneath the screaming, and had finally broken through in
the quiet moments after, in the still, very quiet calm while we
had gathered our wits and our breath and had begun to wonder,
not about the next point of debate, but about whether there was
any point at all. I was quiet now, as I had been then, and my
eyes now, as then, moved slowly across the window and down until
they rested on the black crust, inert on the wood. Under the
muffled rush of the downpour in the bathroom, it was very quiet
in the apartment, and I felt the quiet keenly as I stood looking
at the web, the window, the little monster. Looking hard at the
little monster.
7.
----
We both went to work on that midsummer Tuesday. Despite our
disappointment or unrest, there was a world outside that screen
that we belonged to, as much as we belonged to the world inside
that window and the window belonged to us. I thought about Boris
during the day, from time to time, on a coffee break and during
an endless stretch of meeting in which my department head took
issue with the staff's generous creativity in abiding by the
company lunch policy. I'm sure Martha thought of him, too. When
I arrived home she was standing at the window, purse still over
the shoulder of her lab coat, and she turned to me and smiled
and we embraced.
It was a long hug and we tightened it several times before we
let go and when we let go we looked at each other and laughed.
To my mild surprise, we did the admirable thing and opened up
the window and disposed of the unpleasant remains.
And despite our attachment, any fondness we held or other
emotion that might have come into play over Boris' tenure in our
lives, the pain of his departure was neither profound nor
lasting. We watched a movie that night, a comedy, and we
laughed. The death of Boris had been that of a spider. Despite
anything or everything else, it was the death of only a spider,
and this happens every day, and our Boris, for what little or
lot he had once been, was today nothing more than a discarded
ball of twisted black appendage, presumably legs, for the most
part. These things happen, like I said, every day.
It was a few months later that the red-and-green flyer went
around at the office and proclaimed the glad tidings of another
season's non-compulsory, compulsory event. Martha's friend had
wedded and honeymooned and, in great likelihood, divorced, by
this point, but still I held little relish for the task that
awaited me at home. I told her about the Christmas party that
very night, in fact, and Martha said, very coolly but clearly,
that she didn't think so this year. Too much at the hospital and
so forth. I nodded and was glad the task was behind me.
And it's fine, really. Whatever. Christmas party. Those
corporate goofs are dull anyway and I hope others won't
interpret this as spite, but let's see if I show up at the St.
Jude fundraiser come Memorial Day.
8.
----
For the sake of those who wonder about such things, I still
resist spiders, I still hold them suspect in my heart. My foot
does not falter amid decisive plunges which end with a squish
and a sigh of relief. I won't hold a spider close, I won't touch
one if invited, and if one should chance to walk across my hand
as I lie in bed or sit on the patio, I don't stifle my shudder,
my cringe or my revulsion. But I don't back away, either, I
don't scream and I don't cry, and I think that's all my father
had been trying to get across.
And likewise, for the sake of those curious, my father's
premonition of his son's precocious baldness, sadly and surely,
is slowly coming true. I laugh when I have it in me.
Redmond James (reg_redmond@fca.com)
-------------------------------------
Redmond James is a medical writer in Atlanta, where he explains
things to his dog Dean Cuyler, who is only one year old and not
very well informed. A lifelong croquet enthusiast, Mr. James'
personal dream is to one day compete at the sport's highest
level, whatever that may be.
Chicken Bone Man by Anna Olswanger
======================================
....................................................................
Sometimes Man's Best Friend helps Man in ways
He can't even understand.
....................................................................
The kid I hang around with is a wonder for playing the piano. So
one morning I'm sitting outside under the breakfast room window
listening to him gab to his sister Gertie about the Vaudeville
Revue down at Loew's Palace. In between eating up quite a few
slices of his old lady's toast and jelly, Berl says, "Read the
part again about Princess Rajah and her snakes."
Gertie rattles the newspaper and acts like her valuable time is
being wasted. "It says here that Princess Rajah, the headliner
act in the Vaudeville Revue down at Loew's Palace Theater,
charms her snakes by playing an old-timey rag number on the
piano."
I happen to know the kid is planning a career for himself with
regard to the piano. So when Gertie takes a quick breather from
opening her face, I say through the screen, "Hey, kid, it just
so happens I'm friendly with a frosty blond by the name of
Hortense in the dancing dog act that's playing the Vaudeville
Revue. You want her to get you in stout with the management? I
figure she goes woofle-woofle in the right party's ear, you're a
shoo-in at the next Amateur Night auditions."
"Jerry's driving me crazy with his barking," Gertie says to
Berl. "I bet it's his mange. Rub him down with coal oil."
That Gertie's a pill. How am I supposed to show my mug to
Hortense if I'm covered in coal oil?
Now, Fast Eddie is a mouse acquaintance of mine who makes his
home in the first balcony at Loew's Palace. He tells me what
comes off regarding the kid and his sisters Gertie and Dippy the
night they bust along to the Vaudeville Revue. It goes like
this:
The four of them, Fast Eddie included, get settled into their
seats in the first balcony where they're sopping up the cool.
The Palace has a sweetheart of an air conditioning machine. Then
the orchestra starts in on the overture. The screen rolls down
for the picture part of the bill, and Dippy says, "It's a shame
about vaudeville being on the downswing because of moving
pictures." This crack doesn't sit too well with the kid. Like I
told you, he's got his sights set on pounding the keys in
vaudeville.
When the noggin of John Barrymore, the famous film star,
flickers across the screen, Dippy sighs, "Gosh, he makes the
goose flesh come out all over me." The kid tells her, "It's just
the refrigerating system." This puts the lid on Dippy. So does
noticing Fast Eddie one seat over, because next thing, she
faints.
Dippy rouses herself in time to clap an eye on Czinka Zann,
Cymbal Virtuoso. Eddie, who by now is keeping a low profile
under Dippy's seat, says this Czinka Zann doll sounds to him
like she's dropping pots all over her kitchen floor.
The next act is the headliner's spot. Out comes Princess Rajah,
the dame with the snakes. I see her sideways from where I'm
standing in the alley making conversation with Hortense. The
Rajah dame looks like she's stuck gold coins all over her best
nightie. She lets loose a half-dozen snakes from some hat boxes,
and by the end of her act, these snakes are slithering up and
down her arms in time to "Moonlight on the Ganges." You ever
hear "Moonlight on the Ganges" played in ragtime? Well, if
anybody asks you, it's got plenty of steam.
After an all-doll pig act by the name of Paulette's Pork Chops
closes the show, the kid and his sisters and me hop a ride home
on a streetcar. I sit by the back step where the driver can't
take a squint at me.
"I wonder what Princess Rajah feeds her snakes," the kid wonders
out loud.
"Mice," says Dippy, who's clearly holding a grudge against Fast
Eddie.
"Chickens," says Gertie.
So by the time we get to the turnaround at Crump's Feedstore,
the kid's putting together a ragtime number about chickens for
Princess Rajah to use in her act. He's pouring out words by the
bucketful:
I don't like soup bones in my soup,
or ham bones in my ham.
When the coffee's makin', don't fix me bacon.
I'm the chicken bone man.
I don't want rabbits in my hair,
or sardines out of the can.
Gimme what'll cackle with a crunch and a crackle.
I'm the chicken bone man.
I immediately stake the kid to some valuable advice. "Kid," I
tell him, "you don't want your old lady listening in on this
catchy tune. She might get the idea you're having truck with ham
and bacon." In other words, the kid's Jewish. He's not supposed
to feed himself up on pork. This is all right with me because I
don't like looking in my dinner plate and wondering if one of
Paulette's Pork Chops is looking back at me.
The kid, who's always thinking of my welfare, tells me to put a
lid on it before the driver cocks an ear. Then he announces to
Gertie that he's playing his "Chicken Bone Man" number at the
next Amateur Night auditions and doesn't she want to come along
and be the singing half of the act.
Gertie gives him the chill. "You know I'm training with Miss
Stoots to sing in opera."
Dippy puts in her two cents. "Piano players end up being bums."
Now, this is coming from the mouth of a doll who spends her
nights soaking up Rickenbothom's Rejuvenating Cream while
flopped across the living room sofa.
I don't say anything back, though, because the streetcar is
rattling back and forth on the tracks so hard it's making my
teeth rattle with it.
The next day I'm going ploppity-plop down Faxon Avenue at the
kid's heels. "Kid," I say to him, "I've been doing some
thinking. What if this Princess Rajah dame's snakes eat dogs?
You think those bums would take a bite out of Hortense?"
The kid blows away like we're playing tag. Sometimes he doesn't
see the serious side of life.
We stop at the home of Miss Irma Stoots, a dame with a music
studio joint on the premises. This is where the kid and Gertie
take their lessons. It's the kid's turn this afternoon. I sit on
the back porch and listen through the screen door to the Stoots
dame counting one-two-three, one-two-three, while the kid plays
right along, not missing a note. The thing about the kid is, he
can talk a blue streak and play the piano at the same time.
"I'm writing a special number for Princess Rajah to use in her
snake act down at Loew's Palace," he tells Stoots. "You want to
hear it?"
"Forget the snake act, will you?" I call through the screen.
The dame wants to know how she's supposed to hear anything, what
with me and the kid talking nonstop.
The kid goes right on bending her ear about how it's an
old-timey rag number he's writing. "Of course, what I'm really
swell at turning out is the blues," he tells her. "That's
because Willie Bates, my mama's wash woman, teaches me all the
latest blues numbers from the Daisy, the Negro vaudeville house
down on Beale Street. Say, you want to hear me play 'Kate-er-oo,
Kate-er-oo, You're a Big Stinkeroo?' It's a hot blues number I
wrote myself."
"Berl, dear, you're talking nonsense," she tells him. "You know
I'm grooming you to accompany your sister Gertie on the concert
stage. In fact, I'm letting you accompany her in our recital
next Wednesday night."
"But they're holding Amateur Night Auditions next Wednesday
night down at Loew's Palace!" the kid says. He starts banging
out notes, none of them one hundred-percent.
"Keep your wrists up, dear."
Anybody can see how sorrowed up the kid is over this recital
business. I stick my snoot against the screen and tell the dame,
"Sister! It's a dirty trick you're pulling on my pal. The minute
you set foot on this porch, you're dog food!"
That night I'm in the kid's front yard turning around a few
times under a hydrangea bush. I'm about to plop down and call it
a night when I happen to catch sight of the kid through one of
the upstairs windows. I see he's opening drawers and yanking
stuff out. I figure he's planning to take it on the lam, maybe
soon, which gets me jumpy. I yell out, "You're not packing up to
take a little vacation, are you?"
Feibush, the next-door neighbor, opens a window and says,
"Somebody shut that dog up." Also, the kid's old lady pokes her
noodle out the kitchen window and tells me I'm keeping the
neighborhood awake.
"All right, kid, we'll talk about this later," I mutter, only
I'm talking through my hat because I know in my bones later is
too late.
I don't waste a minute. I step along to the side of the house
where I sniff the kid's old lady through the kitchen window
cooking jelly. I stake her to some of my valuable advice. "It's
about the kid we both know and love dearly," I say through the
screen. "He's taking a run-out powder. That is, unless you hop
over to where the Stoots dame lives and tell her to lay off the
opera dodge."
"Berl!" she calls up the stairs. "It's Jerry's mange again. He's
going to bark all night unless you go outside and doctor on
him."
I see I'm dealing with a hard-hearted dame and that I'm going to
have to get the kid out of this hot spot myself. When he opens
the back door, I say to him like this, "Excuse me, kid," and
without so much as saying _boo_ to his old lady, I'm running
between his legs and grabbing an opened pot of Dippy's
rejuvenating cream off her dresser.
The kid comes busting in and says, "Jerry, you better scram
before Dippy finds out you're in here."
My mouth being full, which saves on conversation, I mumble,
"Don't worry, kid, I'm already taking the breeze."
Now, this is how I come to be copping Dippy's pot of cream.
A while back, the kid, who knows what he's talking about in
these matters, gives me the low-down on Jewish spooks. "Jerry,"
he says, "you ever seen Dippy when she's got that rejuvenating
stuff on her face? It makes her look like a _dybbuk_. That's a
Jewish spook."
So I'm in the backyard rolling this tidbit of infor-mation
around in my head and smearing some of the stuff across my own
mug. When I see by the moon that it's coming on late, I step
along to the side of the house where I get a whiff of Gertie
inside getting her forty winks. "Gertie," I call through the
screen, "you awake?"
As soon as I hear her flopping around in her bed, I wish her a
hello from the spook world and say to her like this, "Gertie,
your ever-loving brother Berl is a big topic of conversation
back where me and the other spooks put up. Here's the low-down.
He's all wrong for you in the opera dodge. Now, unless you want
some dybbuk such as myself paying you a house call every night,
you better get yourself another sucker to accompany you on the
piano." But before I get all this out, Gertie starts screaming
her head off.
"Mama! Papa! There's a peeping Tom outside my window! I said,
Maaaamaaaa!"
Well, I see right away why the Stoots dame is planning to put
Gertie on the opera stage. She can hold a note, indeed. What a
pair of lungs!
"Gertie," I say, "you don't have to get so busted up over it.
You'll find some other sucker to take the kid's place."
Feibush, the next-door neighbor, opens a window and says,
"What's going on? Can't somebody shut that dog up?" So I beat it
before Dippy comes to her window and sees where her rejuvenating
cream walked off to.
The next day I'm sitting on the front porch listening to the kid
plunk out his "Chicken Bone Man" number on the piano. He's
pouring out new words by the bucketful:
I don't like T-Bones in my tea, or lamb chops on the lamb.
I won't ad lib with a barbecue rib. I'm the chicken bone man!
I don't want oysters on the shell, or frog legs in my hand.
I jut my chin and I dig right in. I'm the chicken bone man!
Dippy comes hopping into the living room. "Berl!" she shrieks.
"You want to wake up the dead, not to mention Gertie? You heard
what Dr. Adler said. Gertie's got a bad case of laryngitis!"
I advise Dippy to go off and pour a dose of her old lady's jelly
down Gertie's throat.
"Be quiet, Jerry," she says on her way out.
Then I stick my snoot up against the screen and say to the kid
like this, "Kid, it's too bad about Gertie losing her voice
after all her first-rate screaming last night. It seems she's
going to be out of circulation for a while. The way I figure,
you won't be accompanying her in any upcoming recitals. So what
do you say you cancel your vacation and the two of us form a
dog-and-kid act for next week's Amateur Night auditions?"
The kid takes a squint at me through the screen.
"Picture this," I tell him. "I come popping out of a hat box
like one of the Rajah dame's snakes. I slither around, thanks to
a little coal oil, only not too much. I don't want Hortense
giving me the chill. I sing your catchy "Chicken Bone Man"
number and the next thing you know, we're getting serious
attention from all the dolls at the Palace!"
By this time, the kid can't help but notice the top-notch way
I'm thumping my tail to the beat of "Chicken Bone Man."
"Jerry," he says, "you're about the most talented dog I ever
met. Mama says so too. She can't get over the way you scared off
the fellow nosing around Gertie's window last night. She says
you're a bigger hero than Rin-Tin-Tin!"
Of course, I don't dicker with the kid, or his old lady either,
on this proposition. I start in singing the words to "Chicken
Bone Man," the kid accompanies me on the piano, and Feibush, the
next-door neighbor who's got no taste in music indeed, opens his
window and says, "Somebody shut that dog up."
Anna Olswanger (olswanger@mindspring.com)
-------------------------------------------
Anna Olswanger grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and has made "the
home of the Blues" the backdrop to many of her stories. "Chicken
Bone Man," set in the Jewish neighborhood of Memphis in 1927,
won the 1997 F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Contest, and
appeared in the premiere issue of Lonzie's Fried Chicken: A
Journal of Accessible Southern Fiction and Poetry. Anna's
nonfiction, including interviews with editors and writers, has
appeared in Women's News of the Mid-South, Preservation
Foundation, and Jewish Family & Life. She lives and teaches in
Baltimore. Her limited edition book _Shlemiel Crooks_ is
forthcoming from Tabula Rasa Press in Seattle.
You can hear two different versions of "Chicken Bone Man." Berl
Olswanger's original recording is available in MP3 format. An
instrumental version sequenced by Christopher Breen
<cbreen@pacbell.net> is available in MIDI format and as a
QuickTime movie. A brief excerpt is also available in WAV
format. The "Chicken Bone Man" song is Copyright 1958
Berl Olswanger.
<http://www.intertext.com/v9n2/cbm.mp3>
<http://www.intertext.com/v9n2/cbm.mid>
<http://www.intertext.com/v9n2/cbm.mov>
<http://www.intertext.com/v9n2/cbm.wav>
FYI
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