Collected Short Stories: Volume IV

  Mickey was fastening the decorative trim to the left door panel with sheet rock screws. He bent down and positioned the screw gun over the head of a black screw. There was a whirring burst of noise and the decorative white-trimmed pine tightened neatly against the plywood panel. “The bastards can’t leave well enough alone.”

  They hung the other door, installed the latch and stood back to admire the roofless building. “For the crosspiece,” Mickey pointed to an imaginary midpoint where the newly-formed doors came together, “we’ll go up a couple of feet with scrap lumber, then run a transverse beam. That’ll provide enough pitch.”

  They cut 12 roof joists, angling the near ends to butt up against the crossbeam while the rear bedded comfortably in a notch on the top sill. “What about Mr. Persistence?” Mickey asked. Rasmei looked at him with a dull expression. “The fellow who wants to marry you, over and over again.”

  “Not my type,” she said without further elaboration.

  Mickey removed his tool belt and threw it aside. “That’s enough for today.” He started to collect the smaller tools throwing them into the toolbox. “We’ll cover the roof and lay shingles next weekend and your shed will be finished.

  For two weeks running it rained throughout the weekend. The shed’s bare walls and flooring soaked up the moisture and dried out only to be drenched again. A relentless, unforgiving drizzle was beating down on the roofless shed. The structure reminded Mickey of a fetus, a half-formed, embryo which, in less than a month’s time, would come to full term. The Butt family, he mused, would store their riding lawnmower and gardening supplies, their bicycles, wheelbarrow and god-knows what else in the spacious, new shed. With every tool and trinket, they would become less like their fratricidal countrymen and more like ordinary Americans. Whatever the hell that meant!

  “What should we do about the shed?” Rasmei’s voice on the phone sounded pinched, worried.

  It was eight am. Now, even on the off days when she wasn’t bringing over the little white boxes, the house smelled like a Chinese noodle factory. “How’d you get my number?”

  “You’re in the book.”

  He could hear the oriental inflection - the clipped and brittle precision of English spoken as a second language - in the disembodied voice. “The plywood’s held together with waterproof glue. Rain won’t affect anything.”

  After an uncomfortable pause, she said, “What are you doing?”

  Mickey was standing barefoot in his underwear. “Now?”

  “No, a week from Tuesday.”

  Her pokerfaced brusqueness stood him back on his heels. No one ever called much before noon; the clattering telephone had jolted him out of a comatose fog. “Nothing. I’m talking to you.”

  “Why do you dress like every day is Halloween?”

  Mickey took a deep breath; for a brief moment, he considered hanging up the phone, peeing his brains out, and going back to bed. “In Vietnam I was a lowly grunt… spent three years in light infantry. Mortars mostly. Short range, high trajectory crap. For thirty-six months I slaughtered people at a polite distance.” Mickey paused just long enough for her to tell him to shut up. He cracked his knuckles and farted. “Putting the war behind me has become like a quest for the Holy Grail.”

  “Holy what?”

  His kidneys were beginning to ache with backpressure from a swollen bladder. “The cup used by Christ during the Last Supper.”

  There was no reply. “The punji stick,” he offered, as though speaking in cryptic code. “I got poked and shit on overseas then came home to more of the same. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Tomorrow, if the rain ends, I will teach you how to cut and lay shingles. If the restaurant business ever goes bust, you can always earn a living as a roofer.”

  “Well, goodbye.” She hung up.

  Sunday afternoon Mickey’s sister dropped by unannounced. He was in the bedroom hanging wallpaper, all the furniture pushed against the far wall. “Ten years you never lift a finger to fix anything, and now you’re doing major renovations?”

  Mickey dampened a sponge in a pail of clear water and dabbed at a loose seam. “Do you like the pattern?”

  Two walls were done in a garish metallic plum with mint stripes. Karla ran a hand over the textured paper. “Very classy.”

  Mickey rolled a precut sheet with the paste side facing out and went into the bathroom. He wet the paper in the tub, boxing the ends toward the middle. “You wouldn’t believe what this stuff costs retail.”

  She followed him back into the bedroom. Mickey stood on a step ladder and raised the sheet into place while his sister unfurled it from below. “A contractor I know got the bid to renovate twenty-five rooms at the Ramada Inn.” Mickey slid the wet paper an eighth of an inch closing the seam. Grabbing a short bristle brush, he began smoothing out the air bubbles and excess paste, working from the center in sweeping strokes. “The guy never was much good with a pencil and paper. Miscalculated two rooms over.”

  Mickey knelt down to trim the bulge around an electrical box. “You’re papering the house with leftovers from a motel?” Karla said.

  Mickey waved a utility knife in the air. “The Ramada Inn’s a 4-star joint; they don’t scrimp on furnishings.” He ran a crimping wheel along the baseboard and peeled back the excess. Reaching for the brush again, he tapped the bottom edge neatly into place. “Did you see the living room?”

  Karla went back into the living room and reexamined the paper, a floral motif offset by a rococo border. “Swanky, very elegant,” she confirmed. “If I didn’t know any better, I might think you were either experiencing a midlife crisis or in love.”

  Mickey ran his tape measure across the length of the far wall marking the bare plaster every twenty-one inches. Seven more sheets and, except for the mismatched furniture, there would be no appreciable difference between his frumpy bedroom and a 75 dollar-a-night suite at the Ramada Inn!

  “Those Cambodian girls sure proved you wrong,” Karla said. She was standing by the window, staring into the rain-soaked neighbor’s yard.

  Mickey was on his knees. He placed a framing square flush against the side of a fresh roll and trimmed straight across with the razor. “Yeah well, who knows. The first good winter storm, the shed might still blow over.”

  He retracted the blade back into the knife and joined her by the window. A relentless downpour was punishing the roofless shed. “Two million,” Mickey muttered.

  “How’s that?”

  “One fifth of the Cambodian population. Two million men, women and children… that’s how many people the Khmer Rouge killed in four, shitty years.” He touched his finger to the misted window and traced a circle then split the middle with a curved line into yin-yang symbols. “No hostile, invading enemy. No civil war. Just a bunch of genocidal gooks killing each other for no good reason.”

  Karla stared at her brother in mild surprise. “I didn’t know you cared?”

  “It’s no skin off my ass if they slaughter two or twenty million.

  “Still,” Karla said, “it’s a nice looking shed.”

  When she was gone, Mickey pushed all the furniture against the opposite wall and finished the bedroom. He swept the scraps into a trash bag, washed the floor with a pair of torn boxer shorts, and put the tools away. In the kitchen he dialed a faded number taped to the wall above the telephone.

  “Pick up or delivery?” the voice on the other end of the line said.

  “Pickup,” Mickey said. “Number two special.”

  “One Mexican pizza with hot chili peppers, hamburger, refried beans, diced tomatoes, cheese -”

  “Ten minutes,” Mickey interrupted, “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  After supper, Mickey set the bedroom back in order. He showered and changed into a pair of light-colored Docker slacks and a pea green sports shirt with a crest on the pocket, a present from Karla on his 43rd birthday. He had never worn the shirt before.

  In
the bedroom, he lit a cone of sandalwood incense and watched as a wispy plume of chalky smoke curled toward the ceiling. On the bedroom dresser, he laid out a fistful of diazepam tablets with the distinctive V-shaped design. White, yellow, blue. Placing a blue, 10 mg pill under his tongue, he brushed the remaining pills back into the drawer and flicked the stereo on to 89.7 fm, WGBH. In a mournful legato, Sarah Vaughn was crooning Misty, bending and reharmonizing the tones in ways that only she could comprehend. Sucking in his gut, he stood in front of the full-length closet mirror.

  Twenty years. Though the war ended two decades earlier, Mickey was trying to reach even further back, to retrieve some memory of how things felt before the mortars and madness. By the second chorus, the tranquilizer kicked in. The music, sweetly-scented sandalwood, and plum-colored wallpaper all conspired to lull him back through a narrow slip of a time while outside the sheeting rain continued with the same unbroken intensity.

  Look at me.

  I’m as helpless

  as a kitten up a tree…

  Psycho. The Bates Motel. In 1960, Mickey and a fellow sixth grader snuck into the Brandenburg Cinema to watch Janet Leigh strip down to her ivory slip. During the shower scene, Mickey dropped his head between his knees and simply waited out the ensuing horror. He visited the movie for Ms Leigh’s milky thighs and a hint of cleavage, not the slash and gore.

  On my own,

  would I wander

  through this wonderland alone ...

  Rubic’s cubes, dashikis, spam and eggs, Daisy, pump-action bb rifles, Jade East cologne for men. Shoes with stiffened tongues in lieu of laces - tongues which slid back and forth on wire rails. After only a year or two, the style fell out of vogue. Maypo cereal. Brylcream (just a little dab’ll do ya). Bell bottom dungarees. Muumuus and tie-dyed shirts. Crook, rum-soaked cigars. Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and James Brown and Bill Haley and the Comets (or was that earlier?).

  Church. An altar boy through junior high, Mickey carried the cross; he held the heavy book as the priest read the convocational prayers, even rang the silver bell during Mass.

  never knowing my right hand

  from my left,

  my hat from my glove,

  I get misty or too much in love.

  When the song ended, Mickey went into the bathroom and filled the sink with hot water. He washed and lathered his face. Twice. With an abandoned, old-fashioned double-edged razor that predated his nostalgia, he shaved his beard.

  On Saturday they worked into the early afternoon covering the roof and stapling a protective layer of tarpaper over the bare plywood. Mickey slit open a bundle of gray shingles. Trimming the bottom flaps off several sheets with a utility knife, he nailed the first shingles to the lip of the overhang. Then he showed Rasmei how to alternate rows so the slits formed a broken line leading to the peak. “I’ll snap chalk lines on the tar paper so you can see what you’re doing.”

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “You’re fine; it’s the shitty shingles I don’t trust.” He climbed the ladder and threw a 40-pound bag on the pitched surface. Five hours later Rasmei ran a cap across the peak and the shed was finished.

  “At Sherwin Williams next to the YMCA, get the top grade, opaque stain,” Mickey said. “Any color that matches the house. Two gallons. Tell them I sent you and they’ll charge it to my account and give you the contractor’s discount.” He blew his nose on a handkerchief that had seen better days. “Now tell my why your father never smiles.”

  Rasmei scowled and folded her hands in her lap. “On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge invaded Phom Penh and drove the entire population into the countryside. We took only what we could carry, some gold and jewelry. In a village 25 miles north near Prek Po my mother died of dysentery. Father, a school teacher, was forced into slave labor, harvesting rice seven days a week. We had very little food and people were disappearing, being relocated, every so many months.

  “During the monsoon season, the earth became soaked and began spitting up the bodies of the murdered - political prisoners, school teachers, businessmen, woman and children. It was as though, denied a proper Buddhist burial, their immortal souls were swimming through the muck to reunite with loved ones. Of course, we, the living, knew better. Cambodia was one, huge concentration camp, the killing fields everywhere.”

  “Old news.” Mickey said gruffly. “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  “A year passed. So many men had died, there were two, perhaps three, women for every man. One day a neery, a female soldier, came to my father and said, ‘You shall be my husband.’ My father was horrified. The neery was filthy. She could neither read nor write. An AK-47 slung over her shoulder, she smelled like a dung heap. But as a Khmer Rouge fighter, she could choose anyone for a spouse. To deny her meant almost certain death.”

  “An unimaginable nightmare. After losing all our worldly possessions and watching my mother waste away, my father was now being forced to marry his tormentor! An unwashed, jungle-bred neery… my future stepmother.

  “A month past and a group wedding was arranged. Fifty couples - some willing, others less than enthused about their prospective mates. The day following his second marriage, my father feasted on a bowl of rice gruel spiced with python meat before going back into the paddies.”

  “No rest for the downtrodden.”

  “A month after they were married, the war in the East heated up and my father’s new bride was sent to do battle with the Viet Cong. We never saw or heard from her again. When the Vietnamese liberated our village, we fled to safety in Thailand and then to America.”

  “And the neery?” Mickey asked

  Rasmei shook her head. “Dead or hiding in the jungle with the remnant of Pol Pot’s army.”

  “Who was the woman sitting next to your father in the car the other day?”

  “My mother’s sister. Her husband died during the reign of terror. She fled the country with us after the war; my father thought it only fitting that, to honor the dead, they spend the rest of their mortal lives together.”

  “Your father’s a bigamist.”

  “Polygamy, she bristled, “was an accepted practice among the rich and upper classes in Cambodia for many centuries. And, anyway, I doubt the neery - even if she were still alive - would contest my father’s third marriage.”

  “Which explains why he never smiles.”

  Rasmei shook her head gently up and down. “If you’d been through such an experience, would you?”

  They were sitting on the peak of the newly finished roof looking out over a half acre of wild flowers and straw-colored grass. Previously a cow pasture, the land lay fallow for several years, the only regular tenant a fat ground hog which emerged at dusk to feed. As the sun slouched toward the horizon, they could feel the heat streaming off the fresh shingles.

  A coffee can half filled with stubby roofing nails lay on the roof between them. Rasmei emptied the nails into the pouch on her cloth apron - the same one Mearadey had abandoned - and tossed the can to the ground. “My father bought a new washing machine,” Rasmei said. “A Whirlpool. Dual speed, eight cycles. It even has a hand washable setting for silk and delicate fabrics.”

  “Obviously, you studied the owner’s manual.”

  “My stepmother doesn’t read English, and Mearadey is too scatterbrained to be trusted with laundry. She mixes whites with darker clothes that aren’t color-safe.”

  “There must be a reason you’re telling me this,” he said.

  “Near our prison village was a small river. My mother washed clothes, beating them on a flat stone.” The muscles around her mouth twitched sharply but her voice remained even. “It’s the last memory I have of her before she died.” Rasmei sighed and didn’t speak again for several minutes. “Take me out somewhere.”

  Mickey’s eyes narrowed. “On a date?”

  “Ashamed to be seen with an oriental?”

  “I don’t go anywhere. I’ve no social life.”


  “Saturday afternoon you go off.”

  Mickey laughed, making a derisive snuffling sound that hardly reached to his lips. “I bike two miles down the road to Brandenburg Center. At the Bagels and Cream Delicatessen, I order the luncheon special and a medium coffee. Then I sit in the park and contemplate my navel.” He didn’t bother to tell her about the Maui-wowi.

  “It was just a thought,” she said with a tart brevity that brought closure to the issue.

  Fifty feet away in the field, there was a disturbance. Near a white dogwood tree, the high grass was thrashing fitfully in the opposite direction to a stiff breeze. A clump of blue columbine shuddered and suddenly dropped from sight like a plastic bobber dragged under by a large fish. Mickey put his hand over hers and squeezed the palm. “If you’re up for it, how about gourmet coffee and an assortment of New York style bagels?” he said just as the ground hog waddled into view from behind a thorny tangle of purple-throated jimsonweed and loganberries.

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  Nagel's Bagels

  Lugging a tray of gourmet cheese Danish from the bakery proper out to the selling floor, Becky Borelli eased back through the swinging door, gestured to her mother and muttered, “The new kid’s gone totally mental.”

  In the far corner of Nagel's Bakery Fifteen year-old Curtis Stedman was slouched over a table sobbing mawkishly. His slender body flopped about like a marionette where some practical jokester was jerking the strings causing the limbs to lurch about spastically in an utterly grotesque parody of genuine despair. Just two weeks earlier, the blond haired boy had been hired to work Saturdays plus two afternoons a week.

  Mrs. Borelli approached and asked Curtis what was wrong, but the lanky, fair-skinned boy only wailed all the louder, his bony elbows flailing about aimlessly. A metallic blue Camaro eased into a parking space in front of the store, and a platinum blonde, her hair done up in a tight bun with an ebony comb, eased out of the driver’s seat. “Marone!” Mrs. Borelli grabbed Curtis under the armpit, wrestling him to his feet, and navigated the distraught youth to rear of the bakery.