Collected Short Stories: Volume II

  “Does the name Dwight Goober ring a bell?” Grace was staring at the officer’s leather gun holster. It hugged a small caliber revolver with a leather strap over the firing pin. A pair of silver handcuffs was seated in a leather pouch close by the lacquered nightstick.

  “Did you see him actually throw the eggs?”

  Did I see the Village Idiot egg my house? As a matter of fact, I was coming home from a date, my first romantic soiree since my moronic ex-husband gave me the boot, and there was Dwight Goober, standing in the middle of the street with an egg in each hand. They were locally grown, native brown eggs not the white-shelled variety normally sold in the supermarket. I saw what he did and I’m willing to swear to it on the King James Bible, Koran, Old Testament, I Ching and anything else readily available. I’ll even take a freaking lie detector test if necessary to put the creep behind bars where he belongs.

  “I know it’s that pimply-faced bastard, but I didn’t see him throw the eggs.”

  The officer shook his head. “You’re gonna need an extension ladder to clear that mess.”

  “What about Dwight?”

  “It’s your word against his.” The officer scratched an fleshy earlobe. He had taken out a small pad and pen but put them away without writing anything down. “You know, there’s this guy who installed surveillance equipment for the school district. He also does residential. Fenton,... Yah, Hubert Fenton. He might be able to help you out.”

  Grace was beginning to understand why mild-mannered Walter Mitty types suddenly went postal. The guy who never owned a BB gun much less a hunting rifle buys an AK47 and turns his workplace into a carnival shooting gallery. “You’re telling me to put a surveillance camera on my house.”

  “Cameras,” the officer qualified. “You’ll probably need more than one.” The thickset man heaved his belt higher up on his hips. The gun and the nightstick rocked back and forth, a small container of mace, which Grace had overlooked, nestled firmly in a rear compartment. “You got an extension ladder?” The officer asked.

  Grace once owned a shiny 30-foot extension ladder stored under the crawlspace. It had a deluxe, heavy-duty nylon rope for height adjustments and extra-wide rungs. Stewart took the ladder when he packed his belongings. “Yes,” Grace lied, “I have a ladder.”

  ******

  Saturday morning a pelting, wind-driven snow punished the city. The plows, which had been out since before dawn, were still struggling to keep up with the treacherous black ice. By ten o’clock temperatures eased up a few degrees and the snow shifted over to freezing sleet with a thick scum of slush clogging gutters and sewer drains. “Why aren’t you dressed?” Grace asked.

  Angie was curled up in bed with the blanket over her head. “Carl cancelled. Said he had to go somewhere.”

  A half hour later a familiar pickup truck pulled up in front of the driveway, an extension ladder lashed to the bed with bungee cords. “Heard about your late night visitor.” He released the tension on the cords and lifted the ladder from the truck. Raising the outer track until the top rested against the gutter, he secured the guideline. “Quite a mess.”

  A plow turned onto the street driving the icy sludge ahead of it. “Should you be climbing in the snow?”

  Carl walked back as far as the curb to assess the damage. “If this rain freezes, you’ll never get the crud off before spring.” The ladder was tilted at a cockeyed angle. A thin flagstone borrowed from the walkway remedied the problem.

  “No, that’s not an option.” The thought of her house looking like a pigsty through the remainder of the winter took all the fight out of her. Angie fully dressed came out and stood next to her mother. “You knew?”

  The girl smiled weakly and averted her eyes. “I told him what happened. Didn’t know he’d take it so personal.”

  Carl was already halfway up the ladder and rubbing a rag, which he had soaked in some mysterious solvent, against the siding. The yellow goo hardly budged. He climbed back down and went to the truck. Rummaging in a toolbox, he returned carrying a small chisel. “If this tool can trim rock maple, egg yolk should be a breeze.” He climbed back up the ladder and ran the blade gently against the siding and a section of egg yolk curled away in one long strip. Carl grabbed the tail end of the egg between a thumb and index finger then released his gripped and watched the gossamer fluff float down to the ground. “Progress!”

  Three quarters of an hour later he lowered the ladder and secured it in the bed of the truck. “The jerk who did this to you, does he have a name?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Dwight Goober,” Angie blurted.

  The wind was blowing fitfully lashing the sleet at a cruel angle. “Does Mr. Goober live close by?”

  Grace grabbed him by the forearm and steered Carl toward the front door. “Why don’t you come in and dry off. I’ll put the coffee on.”

  ******

  “Did Carl mention the craft fair?” Angie asked. They were seated at the kitchen table. Carl’s coat and baseball cap was spinning in the dryer.

  Grace looked up. “What’s this?”

  “After someone builds half a hundred or so boxes,” Carl replied, “they have to sell them. There’s a craft fair over to Mansfield next month and I rented a booth. If it’s alright, I thought Angie could come and get savvy on the business end.”

  Grace inched a box of oatmeal cookies across the table. “Only if her mother can chaperone.” She was still thinking about the egg. Carl’s high-powered cleaner proved useless, but with the tiny chisel he managed to scrape away every strand of yolk and egg white. The house was restored back to its original state. The yellow mess was gone and her universe restored to a modicum of harmony.

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “Mansfield’s my fifth show. Didn’t do so hot the first couple.”

  “Poor sales?”

  Carl grinned sheepishly. “Poor salesmanship. I just sat in the back of my booth wearing a grumpy expression and playing the tortured artist. Probably scared half the customers away.”

  “Weirrrd!” Angie was peeling off her ice-covered socks for a dry pair.

  “The guy next to me had a line of handmade leather belts. Nice stuff but nothing to write home about. He was up on his feet, schmoozing with the customers, cracking jokes and selling belts like crazy. I put two and two together. Decided I needed a major ‘poisonality’ overhaul.”

  “I can’t picture it,” Grace said in a mocking tone.

  “No really,” he protested. “I pulled a Jekyll and Hyde. Went from antisocial recluse to salesman-of-the-year. Well, it wasn’t quite so dramatic, but I did figure out how to warm up to the customers.”

  “Tell you a funny story.” Carl reached for an oatmeal cookie. “There was this potter at the last fair. Her parents owned a gift store in rural Tennessee. This local Indian, a Chickasaw woman, sashays into the store one day. She weaves baskets with tribal designs.” “The owner asks, ‘How much do you want for the baskets?’ and she says ‘I don’t know. Maybe five or ten bucks depending on size.’ So she starts selling her handmade baskets in the gift store.”

  Carl bit into a cookie and washed it down with swig of coffee. “Here’s where it gets interesting. A couple years go by. A tourist from Boston visits the store one day and buys a basket. Six months later the Chickasaw basket business goes hog wild. Baskets are selling like crazy. The Indian woman can’t weave them fast enough, and the inventory is literally flying off the shelves.”

  “Come to find out, the tourist was a curator at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in Cambridge, where he placed the basket on exhibit as Native American folk art. Now the Indian woman is no longer just a basket weaver; she’s an artisan – no, make that a Native American artiste, whose medium is reeds and natural dyes. The price mushrooms through the roof. People are paying two hundred, five hundred, a thousand dollars for a single basket!”

  “And then what?”

  ?
??And then the Indian woman, who was in her seventies, drops dead. Rumor has it that many of the townsfolk, local yokels with no great appreciation for art, have squirreled Chickasaw Indian baskets away in their attics or put them up for sale for a dollar or two at garage sales and flea markets. With every new twist the story gets nuttier.”

  Grace swept up some cookie crumbs in the palm of her hand and threw them in the trash. “And they originally cost a couple of bucks.” The plow, which had struggled up to the cul­-de-sac, was making its return run with the slushy mess gurgling and frothing ahead of the blade. “Let’s see about your coat,” Grace rose from the table and led the way down stairs. The dryer was still spinning, but when she pulled the coat and hat out they were toasty warm and dry.”

  Grace folded herself against the man’s chest and his arms came up behind her. He kissed her on the lips. “Carl, what’s happening?”

  “Hard to say.” There was long pause before he finally spoke again. “Ed Gray is head of the English Department.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So technically, he’s your boss.” Carl kissed her neck. “The other day we passed in the hallway and he sneered at me. Apparently, your boss still harbors a grudge.”

  Grace had little trouble picturing Ed Gray sneering at Carl Solomon. Five minutes into the burnt-out drunk’s tirade at the diner, Ed’s nose had begun to twitch, an uncontrollable nervous tic, while his upper lip curled half way to his eyebrows. Grace didn’t bother to tell Carl about the PR campaign to reclaim his damaged credibility. “Ed Gray lives in a world of musty books he can’t even begin to appreciate.”

  “But he could make your life miserable.” Carl released his grip and stepped back, putting his dry jacket back on.

  Grace was trying to remember the Helen Keller quote, but her brain fogged over - something about living with uncertainty, danger being the natural state of animals in the wild. “Yes, the neurotic turd can make my life a living hell,” Grace smiled, a defiant challenge, “but I’m counting on you setting everything right again.” Before he could respond, she lifted up on her toes, planting a kiss on a bristly cheek. “And I’m coming to the Mansfield show whether you like it or not.”

  ******

  Tuesday before class Dr. Rosen, the school psychologist, stopped by the classroom. The psychologist wore a dozen different hats at Brandenburg. He tested special needs kids to determine grade levels and where their educational weakness lay. He also counseled kids with emotional problems and ran a play therapy group at the elementary school. “Lester Boswell’s mother says you’re a saint,” Dr. Rosen threw the remark out in an off-hand manner. “She told me about what you did in the poetry class,… getting Lester actively involved.”

  “The class got a kick out of it.”

  Lester Boswell hadn’t started the year in Grace’s class. He transferred from Charlotte Anderson’s home room in early October. Charlotte was menopausal and taking it out on the class. When her hormones were crashing, teachers could hear the hysterical outbursts from three doors down. Lester, the quiet little gnome with wire-rimmed glasses and a speech impediment, frequently bore the brunt of her feminine angst. After an angry call from the Boswells, Principal Skinner pulled the curtains shut and hunkered down in his office with Dr. Rosen. A week later, Lester was quietly transferred to Grace’s eighth grade class. Charlotte Anderson promptly chose another child, Roberta Tolbert, to replace Lester as black sheep and worthless runt-of-the-litter. Fortunately, Roberta was more resilient than Lester; the teacher’s snide tirades rolled off her thick shoulders like so much briny water off a seagull’s back.

  “Whatever you did,” Dr. Rosen continued, “made Lester feel special.”

  “He is special,” she murmured as an afterthought. “That was the underlying theme of the two poems we read.”

  “When she comes to grips with her midlife crisis,” the psychologist said dryly, “be sure to share that bit of wisdom with Charlotte.” Glancing at his watch, Dr. Rosen rose to leave.

  “That was me a year and a half ago,” Grace blurted out just before the psychologist reached the door.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Charlotte Anderson. It’s her season to crash and burn. A year ago last December I wasn’t much better, what with my marriage in shambles.”

  “But you’re doing better now,” the psychologist remarked.

  “Yes, Lester Boswell and I are having a reasonably decent year.”

  ******

  The week before Christmas Mrs. Shapiro caught the flu. Carl drove her over to the emergency room at Bayberry Hospital. A nurse took her blood pressure and pulse then clipped a device that looked like a high tech clothespin onto the tip of her index finger “Blood oxygen’s a bit low.”

  The doctor wanted to admit her but the cantankerous woman wouldn’t cooperate so they negotiated a compromise. The hospital pumped two bags of electrolytes into a knobby vein in her arm and sent her home with a prescription for cough syrup with codeine and a week’s worth of antibiotics to manage the sinus infection. Grace cooked up a pot of homemade chicken soup with escarole, celery, carrots and basmati rice and, while Carl and Angie were downstairs building jewelry chests, she kept the invalid company.

  “I don’t know what all the fuss is about.” Mrs. Shapiro’s frail body was racked with a broadside of uncontrollable coughing. Propped up in bed with a pillow under her head, her dark hair was matted against her forehead in pasty ringlets.” Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Grace placed the bowl of soup on the bedside table and waited for the convulsive fit to subside.” Like what?”

  “Like if you turned your back for five minutes, you’d find me keeled over stiff as a board.”

  “That’s not likely.”

  “Why not?”

  Grace fluffed an extra pillow and positioned it behind the woman’s scrawny shoulder blades. “Rigor mortis doesn’t set in for at least two hours after a person passes away. And that‘s a medical fact.”

  “I’ll remember that the next time I’m planning to drop dead.” She wiped her mouth and the tissue was smeared with putrid looking greenish phlegm.

  “You look a mess,” Grace replied calmly. “And you probably belong in the hospital.”

  “So now I’m inconveniencing you?” She groused pugnaciously. “A poor old woman wants nothing more than to die with dignity in the comfort of her own home, but you can’t be bothered.”

  “Eat the soup,” Grace counseled, handing her a spoon, “and cheat death.”

  “Cheat the devil’s more like it.” She sipped listlessly at the broth and pushed the bowl away. “So, I heard this improbable rumor. Utterly ridiculous nonsense.”

  “Which was?”

  “No, no! Nothing even worth mentioning.” Grace raised a skeptical eye and the old lady continued, “That some mentally unbalanced English teacher was dating the school janitor.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Anyone else know?”

  “Not yet. We’re dating and it’s no secret. Sooner or later someone from the school will see us out in public. Then we’ll deal with it.”

  “A month after he came to board with me,” the old woman abruptly shifted gears, “Carl asked for something to read. I said, 'Why don’t we take a look in the den. ’”

  In the rear of the house, Mrs. Shapiro’s third husband, Oscar, had converted the den into a private library. Putting his carpentry skills to good use, the man designed custom, floor-to-ceiling, mahogany bookcases. The shelves were stocked with literature in various languages, philosophy and poetry. “Something to read,” Mrs. Shapiro sighed. “What would you offer Rousseau's noble savage or one of the captives in Plato’s hypothetical cave?” There was nothing condescending or sardonic in her tone. “I suggested Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. Carl plowed through Steinbeck in a week. I offered him Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Illyich. He devoured the novella the same day. A collection of Chekhov’s short stories went down like an hors d’oeuv
re.”

  “Last month Carl discovered Wittgenstein, the linguistic philosopher. An English translation of the Tractatus was squirreled away on an upper shelf in the den. He insisted that I explain the epistemological limitations of spoken language.” The old woman had to breathe through her mouth now, her sinuses swollen shut. “A person kisses the picture of an absent loved one. How do we understand the gesture? Is the kiss symbolic or can it be understood at a deeper level? Such actions may simply be the spontaneous expression of an inner need - or no need at all.”

  Grace felt her usually nimble her brain balk at the odd concept. “Where kissing is concerned, lately I prefer Neruda over the linguistic philosophers.”

  Mrs. Shapiro either missed the oblique humor or chose to ignored it. She shook her head and blew out her cheeks in exasperation. “Even for a seasoned academic, Wittgenstein’s theories are daunting.” The room grew silent. The old woman seemed momentarily lost in thought staring at the flowered pattern on her bed sheet. Finally she glanced up with a blank expression and said, “Perhaps you would like to check on your daughter.”

  “Yes, I think I’ll go downstairs.”

  In the basement Carl was cutting a thick slab of wood on the band saw. The block seemed to be moving through the quarter-inch, vertical blade in slow motion following the markings on a paper outline masking-taped to the top. Grace waited until he shut the machine down and stepped away from the tool before entering the work area. Angie was off in a corner spreading glue on small sections of wood.

  “What are you making?”

  “Ring boxes,” her daughter replied, smearing yellow glue with the tip of a finger over a mitered joint. The box contained six sides. She stood them up on edge, nudging the joints together in a lopsided hexagon. “Hand me that rubber band,” Angie said. The young girl stretched a band around the perimeter of the box. The sides bowed and twisted, but when the band was firmly in place, the wood settled into a perfectly symmetrical hexagon.

  Grace handed her daughter another band which she secured over the bottom of the box. “Very clever.” Carl flipped the band saw back on again, which was Grace’s cue to head back upstairs.