edited to top 5
The Reluctant Bigamist
by
Barry Rachin
* * * * *
Published by:
The Reluctant Bigamist
Copyright © 2011 by Barry Rachin
This short story represents a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
* * * * *
The Reluctant Bigamist
When Karla Pilsudski stopped by her brother’s place, she found Mickey, crouched behind the living room sofa peeking through the curtains. Around his thick neck hung a chain of armor piercing, machine gun shells. The week after his Army discharge, he bored the quarter-inch holes in the soft, brass casings, later threading the bullets together on a length of rawhide. Like so many golden, shark’s teeth, the shells fanned out across a khaki T-shirt with a gash under the left armpit.
Karla placed a grocery bag on the coffee table. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Reconnoitering,” he muttered, without turning his head. “A full battalion of VC recently infiltrated the countryside.”
A gawky woman with plain features and a thin, residual scar below her nose from a harelip, Karla leaned closer for a better look, almost rising up on Mickey’s shoulders piggyback style. In the next yard over, two, oriental girls were building a clumsy, wooden frame with two-by-fours and a bag of 8-penny nails. The rectangular structure lay on the uneven ground. “Your new neighbors are Cambodian, not Vietnamese,” she noted.
Tat. Tat. Tat. The older girl, plump and in her thirties, alternately hammered the studs together then tug them apart. The younger, much prettier girl stood to one side wearing a goofy, ineffectual grin. Lost in adolescent reveries, she held the bag of nails against her meager breasts.
“What are they doing?”
“Building a storage shed.” Mickey gestured with his eyes at a mound of rubble directly behind the girls. “A squad of enemy sympathizers poured the foundation last weekend.”
Karla cringed. “I wish you wouldn’t talk crazy.”
The girls moved a few feet away and were hidden behind a Scotch pine. Mickey lurched to the next window over. Now the tangled clothesline with its T-shaped poles was blocking his view. He had absent-mindedly left the rope out all winter; having repeatedly frozen and thawed so many times, the cotton cord was ruined. Cracked and discolored, the old-fashioned, wooden clothespins weren’t much better. Not that he bothered much with laundry in recent years. A month after they moved in, the Cambodians installed a sleek, umbrella-shaped unit, the metal pole sunk in a foot-deep tub of cement and crushed stone. The clothesline arms folded straight up and out of the way when not in use.
“A friend of mine works at the Providence Housing Authority. He says a Cambodian family in one of their units lined their living room floor with plastic drop clothes, spread a six-inch layer of topsoil and planted rice.”
“Preposterous!” Karla eyed her brother suspiciously. “How did management find out?”
“Drop cloth sprang a leak, flooding the apartment below.”
“Racist hogwash!”
“Yeah, well I’ve heard the same, whacky story from three, semi-reliable sources.” Mickey scratched an inflamed hair follicle buried in his scruffy beard. “Drive down Cranston Street. On every dilapidated corner, all you see are Cambodian markets, nail salons and eateries.”
“Blight with a Southeast Asian hue,” Karla interjected acidly, anticipating his train of thought.
“They doubled and tripled-up in single bedroom apartments,” he ignored her sarcasm. “Extended families of grandparents, in-laws, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, and halfwit second cousins once removed.”
“So what’s your point?” Karla pressed.
Mickey reached into his front pocket and fingered a joint the size of an Italian sweet sausage. Pure Maui-wowi. Hawaii's finest. He tested the ends to insure they were twisted tight. “Nothing,” he muttered without conceding defeat. “A simple statement of historical fact.”
It was ninety degrees, the middle of August. In an hour or so, he would pedal his ten-speed bike into Brandenburg Center, sit on an isolated bench in the rear of Veteran’s Memorial Park and get blissfully wrecked. Around two pm, he’d wander over to Bagels and Cream for the luncheon special and a cup of mocha Java cappuccino, then return to his spot in the leafy park until dusk. A perfect day... a no-brainer.
“Goddam nails are too short,” Mickey said peevishly. “The slightest breeze would blow the foolish structure over.”
“It’s none of your business how they build their shed if, in fact, that’s what they’re doing.”
“I wouldn’t build an outhouse with anything less than three-and-a-half inch nails.” Mickey lumbered away from the window and grabbed the grocery bag. “Where’s the Heineken?”
Karla’s expression soured. “Last thing you need,” she said, pointing at a beer gut which resembled a full term pregnancy. Following him into the kitchen, she watched as her brother sorted the groceries.
“You never called my girlfriend. It’s been a month now,” Karla said.
“The gay divorcée?”
She removed a beer can from the piano bench. Liquid had seeped through the finish to the porous wood below and left a darkened halo. Most of the furniture had similar, alcohol-induced blemishes. “Betty’s the new deaconess at church. You might have known that if you ever showed up for Sunday services.”
Mickey opened the refrigerator and slid a tub of unsalted butter onto the middle rack. “Her husband ran off.”
“The marriage ended by mutual consent.”
“Then why’d he bail out on the woman?” Mickey pressed.
“Betty,” she said casually, “is a bit of a fussbudget.”
He set a box of pitted prunes in the cupboard. “Which is to say, the woman’s a control freak. An anal compulsive whacko.”
The scar on her top lip flexed and furrowed in a bleak smile. “We’ll put Betty on hold for now.” Karla glanced at her watch. “Kids will be home from school soon. I gotta run.”
She turned to go but Mickey grabbed her arm and gestured in the direction of the Cambodian’s property. “Three, shitty years in Vietnam, and now I got to wake up and look at these slant-eye assholes every day for the rest of my life.”
Mickey glanced distractedly about the bedroom. A cardboard box with empty beer cans lay in one corner. The bed was unmade, the top sheet trailing on the floor. A dust bunny the size of a small rodent peeked out from behind the box. Next to a half-eaten slice of pepperoni pizza, a pile of girlie magazines littered the night table. Mickey never paid full price. Rather, he bought outdated, remaindered issues - 3 for 10 dollars - the front covers ripped off. Retrieving a carpenter’s belt from the floor, he slipped a hammer into the rawhide loop and clipped a Stanley 25-foot Powerlock II tape measure to the leather pouch.
“Excuse me,” Mickey hollered, stepping over the property line, “but I couldn’t help notice.” The heavier girl straightened up and stared coolly at him while her younger sister giggled and looked embarrassedly away. Mickey drew the tape from his work belt and ran the yellow blade the length of the bottom board. “None of these studs are centered.”
The older girl edged forward and stared blankly at the metal tape. Mickey pointed to a thin, black line with arrows on either end which bisected the blade every 16 inches and began marking the wood with a flat, carpenter’s pencil. “This is where you want the studs for a proper, nailing surface.” Fishing a hammer from the leather belt, he struck the base sharply, separating it from the others boards. The pretty girl jumped, s
campering toward the house.
“You barge into our yard uninvited,” the older girl hissed, “and tear our new shed apart.” Squat and nondescript, she had little of the exotic charm usually associated with oriental woman. Using the claw, Mickey began removing the bent nails. “What are you doing now?”
“These nails are too short. They won’t hold a shed together.” Mickey retrieved one of the ruined nails and tossed it over his shoulder.. “Wouldn’t build an outhouse with anything less than three and a half-inch nails.” He lumbered back to his house and returned a moment later with a pail of framing nails and a 48-inch level.
Ignoring the women, he hammered the wood together, two nails in either end, to form a simple box, then sandwiched the remaining, five studs at equal intervals. Placing the level on the foundation, Mickey lifted one end and checked the yellow bubble. “Foundation’s cockeyed. You’ll have to shim the front in order to keep the building straight up and down.”
“And if we choose not to?” The older girl blustered.
Mickey put his hand in his pocket and fingered the bulging joint. “It’s the weekend,” He replied ignoring the question. “I won’t need these tools until Monday morning. Consider the nails a gift, an unsolicited act of Caucasian kindness.” Leaving the tools and nails strewn on the ground, he wandered back to his own house.
Around five, Mickey returned from the park. In the next yard over, the rear and two side walls were standing erect on the foundation which had been shimmed with remnants of cedar shingles to a perfect 90 degrees. “Sonofabitch!” he muttered.
Around eight o’clock, there was a knock at the door. The two, Cambodian sisters were standing on the front stoop with a brown paper bag. “I rang the bell for the longest time,” the older girl noted peevishly.
Without being asked, she stepped over the threshold and into the house. “I’m Rasmei Butt and my sister’s name is Mearadey.”
The last person brazen enough to show up unannounced was a Jehovah Witness hawking salvation and back issues of The Watchtower. As the zealot was just getting up a head of apocalyptic steam, Mickey went into the bedroom to locate some of his own, illustrated literature, and the visit was curtailed.
“And you are?” Rasmei asked.
Mickey tentatively sniffed the air. “Something smells good.”
“Your name, please.”
“Mickey .” He moved a few steps closer. “What’s in the bag?”
“My family runs an oriental restaurant. We brought you some delicacies.”
Mickey whisked the bag into the kitchen and began opening containers. “Mooshi beef with hoisin sauce,” Rasmei said, indicating a dish with a half dozen, thin, rice flour pancakes, “and shrimp fried lort.”
The sink was full of dirty plates. Along with the oil-stained pizza box, a half-dozen crumpled beer cans littered the counter near the refrigerator. Grabbing a fork and clean plate from the cupboard, she scooped the food onto the dish. “Six treasure chicken.” Rasmei held a selection up to his nose. “Each treasure represents a spice: fennel, anise, ginger, licorice root, cinnamon and clove.” She stared blankly through a torn undershirt at his hairy chest. “It’s the house specialty. Very popular.”
“No fortune cookie?”
“Fortune cookies are reserved for paying customers,” Rasmei replied laconically.
Only now Mickey noticed that the older girl wasn’t really fat - at least not like the slobby hausfraus-turned-soft-porn-queens in the grosser, triple-X girlie magazines. The Cambodian woman was short and compact with wide, almond eyes and a fleshy, pushed-in nose. The skin was dark as chocolate ice cream. An unromantic, no-nonsense face. Out of a sense of sympathy (or generosity) one might say she was ‘handsome’ in comparison to her younger sister.
“I have a proposition,” she said as he was reaching for a second helping.
Mickey waved a greasy fork in the air. “Barter food for brawn.”
Her wide nostrils flared. The younger girl sat down at the table and stared at her nails which were decorated in an elaborate, multicolored pattern. “Mearadey and I will do the actual building,” Rasmei clarified. “I only need you to straighten things out as you did earlier when we hadn’t spaced the boards properly.”
Mickey pried open a plastic container of golden sauce dusted with bright red flecks of cayenne pepper. He didn’t know what pained him more: the prospect of dealing with the insufferable older sister or supervising the ineffectual Mearadey, with her straight, black hair falling down to the small of her slender back. “I could only help on week ends and, even then, it’d take a good month to get the walls covered, shingle the roof and hang doors. Why are you doing this?”
“It’s a birthday present for our father.”
An image of the sour-faced, ill-humored Mr. Butt flitted through his brain. Earlier in the week, while changing the oil in his truck, Mickey had met his new neighbor. Lying flat on his back, he had just cracked the nut on the oil pan and was sliding a plastic tub under the chassis when he looked up. An older man with dark features and a sunken chest was staring down at him like a stupid bug. The man scowled, and then walked briskly away without a word or friendly gesture. “Jerk!” Mickey pulled the plug out of the oil pan and felt the scalding oil curl around his thumb like a knife blade. “Weasel-faced, bastard!”
Rasmei drifted to the window and admired her handiwork one yard over. “We could have easily gotten the front wall up, but for two, minor details.”
“Which were?”
“Doors and window.” Mearadey placed an ornately painted hand over her mouth and tittered fitfully.
Mickey closed the containers, took a swig of beer and belched. “In the morning, with your perseverance and Mearadey’s moral support, we’ll build the front wall.” Rasmei gestured to her sister that it was time to leave and the lithe girl, who hadn’t uttered a word since entering the house, rose to her feet and padded soundlessly to the door.
As they reached the living room, Rasmei said, “Are you eccentric or just making a fashion statement?”
“I could ask the same of you,” Mickey shot back, indicating the loose fitting, wraparound silk skirts that both girls were wearing.
She fingered one of the 30-caliber, shell casing that hung from his wide neck and scowled with a bland, almost clinical detachment. “This is called a sampot, a traditional Cambodian garment.” She scratched her fleshy nose. “You were in the army during the Vietnam War?”
“Three years near Pleiku. At a firebase in the Annamese highlands.”
“You made it home in one piece,” Rasmei observed. "The war was already over when I graduated from high school."
"Didn't miss much." Mickey shot back. "In 1967, General Westmoreland decided to go after the Viet Cong with US infantry. Operation Fairfax. The goal was to harass and ambush enemy units operating in the countryside around Saigon." It was still light out but the sun was beginning to fade causing familiar images to blend and blur. "We killed 3,000 NVA and Viet Cong troops. Three thousand. A nice round number."
"American casualties?" Rasmei asked.
"Nineteen hundred troops were lost in the operation." Mickey spoke in a dull monotone as though citing historical statistics. "In April, there was another series of bloody engagements. We destroyed 1000 NVA at Loc Ninh, 1500 more further north at Dak To." "Of course, we were just pissing in the wind. The whole, cruddy war was a fraud, a bad joke played out at our expense."
Mickey spent three years in Viet Nam. When the lieutenant in charge of his unit stepped on an anti-personnel mine, he was promoted to platoon sergeant. His first kill occurred during a routine sentry duty at a firebase in the Mekong Delta. Not that there was anything routine about killing someone.
Two hours into Mickey’s watch, a Viet Cong soldier dressed in loose-fitting blue cotton pants came up over a ridge into the clearing a hundred and fifty yards away. The man, in his early twenties, was lean and muscular. He carried an AK 47 assault rifle and a leather cartridge belt with
ammunition clips slung around his neck. Alone, the enemy soldier sauntered towards him at a relaxed, loping gait as though he had no idea there might be any Americans close by. Mickey fixed the man's chest squarely in the crosshair of his scope sight and squeezed off a round. There was a delay between the report of exploding gun powder and its consequence. The man dropped or, more precisely, slumped forward on his face, and did not stir or make a sound. The bullet struck squarely in the heart.
The body just lay there, inert, insubstantial, all the vibrant energy dissipated by the quarter inch ball of hot lead. Mickey sat up in the foxhole and looked around. Nothing. The birds, which had fallen silent when the gun erupted, resumed their cheerful chatter. A warm breeze drew the scent of orange blossoms from God-knows-where into his nostrils driving out the acrid scent of burnt powder.
Ten minutes passed. A pastel-colored moth, unearthly huge and ephemeral, flitted over the tall grass before disappearing into the thick brush. The body never moved. Not that he expected it to, but now the trajectory of his life catapulted crazily off course. A man was dead and Mickey was sitting comfortably in a foxhole surrounded by orange blossoms and a chortling chorus of birds and bull frogs.
For the next month, every young, Vietnamese woman he passed was the dead man's wife or kid sister; every middle-aged couple his mother and father anxiously waiting a triumphant homecoming and, with each passing day, fearing the worse. Other murderous battles would engage his mind; he fought his heart out and counted his blessing to remain among the living. But this first kill was too ordinary and unambiguous. The man in the blue pants came up over the ridge, and Mickey placed a 30-millimeter slug through his heart. He had no opportunity to defend himself - not that war was a gentleman's sport; in retrospect, Mickey felt no obligation, moral or otherwise, to act differently.
The first years following the war, Mickey carried on an obsessive, almost ritualistic, dialogue with the dead man’s family. At weird hours of the early morning when his insomnia kicked into overdrive, he would review the circumstances surrounding the Vietnamese soldier's death. He gathered the family members together inside his head - a confluence of sympathetic minds and spirits. Never asking their forgiveness, rather he begged them to understand the insane logic of war.