Collected Short Stories: Volume II

  Bruce lifted the bow free of the wall and ran the palm of his hand over the wooden stock. "It's a, Excalibur Equinox model with a sixteen and a half inch power stroke." He pulled an ominous looking arrow from the bow-mounted quiver. "Velocity’s up around three hundred fifty feet per second, which will bring down a full-grown stag instantly as long as you set the shot up properly." He passed the bow to Allen who lofted it up and down in his hands. The lethal device was remarkably light. "I always try to set my shots up broadside or quartering away."

  "And why's that?" Allan had no idea what the man was talking about.

  "The razor sharp arrow’s got to penetrate both lungs for a quick kill." He took the crossbow back, repositioning it on the far wall. "You don't want an animal to suffer needlessly."

  "No certainly not," Allan agreed.

  "I hit a buck last year in Aroostook County, Maine, and the poor son of a bitch ran off into the brush. I had to track him for three miles before the injure critter expired." Bruce wagged his handsome head thoughtfully then tapped the bridge of his nose - once, twice, three times - with a taut index finger. "The nose knows - it's a saying among hunters. An injured animal can smell the fabric conditioner or laundry detergent your well-intentioned spouse used when washing a camouflage jacket, so, with a wounded animal, all you can do is follow the blood trail until you finish the job."

  Allan jettisoned Bruce Beagle from his mind. He couldn’t remake himself. The time for midlife crises was passed. He went into the den and pulled out his saxophone. Fitting the mouthpiece on the neck, he blew a series of velvety-soft whole tones. Allan was still working out the melodic inversions that Herb Calloway had shown him. G-minor seven, C seven. He ran a linear riff based on pentatonic scales and passing tones. Simple stuff. Next he transposed the lick up a triton interval to the key of F-sharp. What was it Herb had cautioned? The weird-sounding notes become upward extensions of the original chord. Flatted ninths, raised elevenths … that sort of textured voicing.

  The other night at a nightclub south of Boston, Allen blew a new lick he had worked out using Herb’s harmonic substitutions. He muddled through the first flurry of notes only to crash and burn on the backside of the angular, melodic phrase. A customer at the bar looked up from a watery martini with a foul expression.

  * * * * *

  A year later Ruthie had a baby brother. Her mother and step-father had decided to start a family of their own. Allan was happy for them, if a bit jealous. Once or twice his ex-wife inquired about Allan's personal life but, since the new arrival, discretely avoided the topic and for that he was thankful. Allan went out on a couple blind dates - fix-ups-mix-ups. In October the band was offered five nights steady in the Marriot Hotel lounge. The money was lousy, and the musicians would be forfeiting more lucrative, 'commercial' gigs on nights that the band was committed to working the lounge, but it was steady work - steady work in a tough economy.

  "You know that dame?" They were fifteen minutes into the second set at the Marriot. The bass player was gesturing with his eyes at a woman with a modestly good figure in a strapless, black evening dress.

  "Never seen her before," Allan replied. He bent over the bandstand and thumbed through a list of tunes trying to decide on the next selection.

  "Strange, because she’s been gawking at you for the past five minutes."

  Allan looked again. The darkened lounge was riddled with shadows and a cloud of cigarette smoke obliterated the tables over by the vending machine. Muriel Beagle, his daughter's former piano teacher, was standing near the entrance. He hadn't seen or heard from her since the final lesson. No, that wasn't completely accurate. Muriel had called the house mid-September the week after school resumed to inquire about Ruthie's musical plans. As soon as Allan recognized the grating monotone, his mood soured. "She's taking time off," Allan returned noncommittally.

  "Well, Ruthie shouldn't wait too long or her technique will suffer. Learning to play a musical instrument is a cumulative process."

  "Yes," Allan brought her up short. "We’ll get back to you as soon as she's ready to resume." The man had never bothered to tell Muriel that he, too, was a professional musician. He just wanted to finesse the insufferable woman off the phone and be rid of her - irrevocably and undeniably finished with Muriel Beagle. But like an apparition from hell, there she was again, and Allan couldn't just ignore the former piano teacher. Resting the saxophone on its stand he descended the stage and crossed the room.

  "You never told me you were a musician."

  Allan shrugged. "It's nice to see you." She still looked the same - the toothy overbite and languorous expression. Lipstick and eye shadow afforded the woman a certain perky flair, but it wasn't enough to offset the excess baggage. "What brings you here tonight?"

  Muriel gestured toward the main function hall across the hallway at a diagonal. "My nephew's wedding."

  "How nice!" If they hadn't taken the lounge gig, Allan probably would have found himself fifty feet away on the other side of the partition. He reached out and patted her on a bare arm. "I've got to get back to work."

  "Yes, of course. Give my regards to Ruthie."

  Why did he touch the woman's arm? Back on the bandstand, Allan adjusted the strap and reached for his instrument. He shouldn't have touched her. It was just a formality, a social amenity, but still... And he had forgotten to ask about Bruce. Was he still shooting the rapids and bagging big game - hitting them broadside or quarter away so as to ravage both lungs with razor sharp arrows? "Let's pick up the tempo," the drummer said. "Green Dolphin Street in E-flat." He counted off the tempo and the rhythm section kicked into overdrive.

  Around eleven-thirty, Allan caught sight of Muriel sitting alone at the bar. The wedding had broken up around ten o'clock after the bride threw the bouquet and the wedding cake was served. Shortly thereafter, the guests collected their belongings and filtered out of the function hall. Something clearly was wrong. When the final set ran its course, Allan wandered over to the bar. "How was your nephew's wedding?"

  "Great! They're flying to Aruba in the morning." Muriel was totally drunk.

  Allan scanned the hallway. "I didn't see Bruce."

  "And with good reason." Slurring her words, she almost toppled off the barstool. Allan reached out to steady the woman but she didn't seem to notice. "About eight months ago, Bruce ran off to North Dakota with a twenty-something, back-to-nature bimbo."

  "I'm so sorry."

  "Don't be." Her tone was equal parts flippant and dismissive. "Except for sex, we were never a particularly good match." She paid her tab and stood up on wobbly legs. "That progression you played on the last measure of The Shadow of your Smile was quite clever."

  Allan explained that the technique was based on symmetrical patterns." She glanced at her watch. "It is rather late and I should be going." Muriel lurched forward and almost lost her balance a second time.

  Allan steered her into a Windsor chair. "Wait here, while I collect my stuff. I can give you a lift home."

  "Lucky you!" The bass player tittered when Allan climbed back up on the bandstand.

  "Yeah, lucky me," he muttered morosely.

  On the ride home, Muriel fell sound asleep, snoring loudly with her right cheek - not a pretty sight - mashed up against the passenger side window. The house was empty. "We are your kids?"

  "My mother took them for the night so I could attend the wedding."

  "I’ll swing by in the morning and shuttle you back to the hotel to collect your car."

  "That's so sweet of you." The music teacher began to cry. She cried quietly, the way children sometimes do without bothering to place her hands over her face, the salty wetness dribbling down her chin.

  Allan handed her a napkin. "Why don't I make some coffee?"

  The woman in the strapless black evening dress shook her head up and down as she blotted the tears. "I'm not usually like this," she confided with a sheepish smile.

  A blob of purple mascara was smeared garishly across
her left cheek. “Go in the bathroom and wash your face," Allan suggested while I make the coffee?"

  Ten minutes later, Muriel shuffled back into the kitchen. She was wearing a pair of flannel pajamas. Her face had been scrubbed clean, the hair pulled back with a cotton scrunchy. She walked up to Allan and stood so close that he could feel her whiskey-sour breath on his cheek. "There's something you need to hear." Muriel had regained her composure; she wasn't drunk anymore. "I'm a shitty piano teacher - the worst music teacher in the universe."

  "This really isn’t nec -"

  "No, even if you hate my guts, you're going to hear me out." Three or four inches shorter than Allan, the woman had to crane her neck to make eye contact. "I chose badly. I should have been a construction worker, pastry chef, dentist, mortician, street walker… anything but a goddamn piano teacher."

  "Geez, Muriel. For Christ sakes get a grip!"

  "But everything's gonna change." She rushed ahead, ignoring his plea. "I'm closing the studio. No more music lessons. My brother-in-law, the one whose son got married today, runs a catering business. I'm gonna work for him arranging functions and preparing meals."

  A strong aroma wafted through the room. "I think the coffee's ready."

  "Would you like to spend the night?" She was leaning up against him now and, through the fleecy flannel, Allan could sense that Muriel Beagle was not wearing any bra. Her enticing fleshliness notwithstanding, Allan's muddled brain was preoccupied with a different agenda. He detected a subtle inflection - a sense of urgency coupled with restraint - as she spoke. The words rose and fell in rich cadence; earlier Muriel tripped over a troubling phrase then, catching her emotional stride, rushed impetuously ahead. She sounded human, vulnerable, exposed, and utterly human.

  "Would you like to spend the night here," she repeated.

  "Yes, I would like that very much, but since we went to all the trouble, let's have coffee first."

  The sex - it wasn't quite what Allan expected. He had only been with a meager handful of woman before marrying and even fewer since. "Following my second pregnancy, I had my tubes tied,” Muriel Beagle whispered, “so there's no need to worry." With a deep sigh she threw her arms up over her head and gave herself to him. It only took a few minutes. Afterwards, Allan lay on his back in blissful torpor. "I'm going to grab a quick shower, if you don't mind." Muriel slid off the sheets and disappeared into the bathroom. Ten minutes later, a freshly scrubbed Muriel Beagle was snuggling next to him with a hand resting on the small of his back. Her breath smelled of minty Listerine. "I want what you have."

  "And what might that be?"

  "Since my husband left, I've been crippled by loneliness. I don't feel like a complete person …whole inside."

  Yes, there it was again! She spoke in whisper-soft, hushed tones, and yet an oddly expansive sonority had crept to her voice. “I didn't know I was a role model for much of anything." Allan kissed the side of her face then rubbed the moistness away with the heel of his hand. "Let me tell you about my Fourth of July." Allan recounted his dark night of the soul at the hands of the spunky teenager vixen with the amazing chest.

  "And you think it's any different for single, middle-aged woman?" Snuggling closer, there was nothing judgmental in her tone. She draped a calf over his leg. Allan could feel Muriel’s pubic hair tickling his crotch. "What do you think?" Her intent was unmistakable.

  Slipping an arm around the small of her back, he rolled over. "Yes, I don't see why not."

  On the ride home, Allan took stock of things. A Friday afternoon booking had been cancelled on short notice. The groom got cold feet and ran off somewhere. The band got paid whether they played or not, because, in the event of conjugal calamities, ‘no refund beyond a fixed date’ was stipulated in the contract. Allan would take Ruthie out for supper and she could sleep over, freeing up his ex-wife to do as she pleased. Monday afternoon, the band was rehearsing new material - mostly covers of Top-40 material. Allan would have preferred an earlier time slot, but the lead guitar player, who had a thyroid condition and took hormonal supplements made from desiccated pig glands, could never pull himself out of bed much before noon.

  There had been another session with Herb Calloway. He showed Allan how to substitute augmented scales over dominant seventh chords to add musical color. The 'trick' - Herb had a thousand-and-one musical tricks up his sleeve - was to approach the dominant seventh as a whole tone scale. "All six notes will hang together," Herb counseled, "because the first three are diatonic to the triad. Next comes the sharp eleventh, augmented fifth and the dominant seventh.” He wrote an example out on a sheet of music paper labeling each tone as either complimentary or an upward extension of the original chord.

  Allan made reservations to take Muriel Beagle out to supper at an Indian Restaurant three blocks over from Copley Plaza in downtown Boston. Muriel was partial to curry and had a crock pot recipe for curried chicken basted in white wine sauce, topped with Basmati rice, green onions and pineapple chunks. She thought she might introduce the recipe as an offering with her brother-in-law's catering business, but not until later when she was more settled in the new venture.

  Back to Table of Contents

  Emergence

  The diary lay abandoned on a chair in the passenger terminal of Southwest Airlines. Nadia Rasmussen noticed the leather-bound journal as she slumped down in the seat opposite and reached out reflexively but almost immediately thought better and pulled back.

  A year earlier almost to the day she had been returning home from another librarians’ conference in Seattle when she spied a shiny paperback – a perfect bound, Penguin Classic edition with the signature black spine and orange logo. This book, too, had been orphaned, deserted, cast off like a jilted lover by its anonymous owner. Nadia held the book up to the dim light. The First Circle by Alexander Solzhenitsyn - what a find! She had already read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward. Now this thick tome would keep her occupied for the better part of a week or more.

  Strange though, how the cover appeared flawlessly immaculate without a single crease or physical blemish – not just pristinely clean, but unread. But then, perhaps the owner bought the novel for the flight out and promptly mislaid the book in the commotion as the plane began boarding. Nadia cracked the front cover, curling the spine stiffly back on itself. A coffin-like rectangle an inch deep had been carved out of the text block.

  The previous owner was smuggling drugs!

  Once through customs, the mutilated masterpiece had served its purpose and been promptly discarded. Looking over her shoulder to make sure no one was watching, Nadia replaced the disfigured book back where she originally found it and moved several rows away. After that unsettling experience, she resolved to ignore any similar serendipitous finds.

 

  “Is this yours?” An elegantly-dressed, black woman with pearl drop earrings was leaning across the aisle waving the leather journal at Nadia.

  “Yes, thank you,” she replied absently. Nadia took the book and concealed it in the side compartment of her carryon bag. Then she felt her face flush and heart racing out of control. What if the owner came rushing back to reclaim his property?

  Did anyone see a coffee-colored, leather-bound journal with an ornate hand-tooled façade? Over the intercom a representative announced that the Southwest flight to Boston’s Logan Airport would be boarding momentarily. The black woman with the stunning earrings went and stood in line with other passengers queuing up in front of a small door leading to the plane. Nadia waited discretely a good a five minutes before collecting her carry-on luggage and joining the others.

  An hour into the flight, Nadia settled on a plan of action. Without bothering to examine the content of the journal, she would locate the author’s name and address, which in all likelihood was recorded on either the inner flap or first few pages. Once home, she would mail the object to its rightful owner with a short note explaining how the diary came into her possession. No need to iden
tify herself or provide return address. The simple, straightforward act of returning the journal – unread, of course - would rectify the earlier faux pas. However, an hour into the flight when she finally got around to opening the manuscript, Nadia discovered no address, not even a first or last name. Thumbing through to the back, the last few pages were utterly blank. The owner would remain forever anonymous, nameless and unidentified.

  The ethical dilemma having taken yet another perverse detour, whatever personal obligation she originally felt to reunite the handwritten diary with its creator no longer existed. Nadia could discard it by dropping the journal in the trash at her earliest convenience once the plane touched down in Boston. Or she could leave it somewhere in Logan Airport – perhaps near the reservations counter or on an empty seat in one of the terminals for the next would-be passerby.

  The fasten seatbelts sign was extinguished, and an hour later the stewardesses began serving a light lunch as the plane passed over the Rockies. Nadia sipped a V-8 vegetable juice cocktail while munching an oatmeal raisin cookie. The rather plump middle-aged gentleman sitting next to her in a pin-striped suit ordered a gin and tonic, which he polished off in short order.

  The man, who was rather short with a washed out, pallid complexion, suffered from male pattern baldness, the fine hair on the crown of his head receding in frizzy tufts to form an unflattering ‘M’. Nadia had read somewhere that the condition was induced by hormones and genetic predisposition. As the stewardess passed in the aisle, the fellow pulled her aside and ordered a second drink. Just a moment earlier, Nadia had caught him ogling her chest, although maybe it was just her imagination. “What are you reading?” He indicated the leather journal.