Fiction

THE MAGICIAN’S THUMB

By Dennis Scott Herbert

It wriggled and writhed on the floor attached to a string that we could all see but pretended not to because Rodney was trying so damned hard and he hadn’t drunk a drop for three months.

But when the dog swooped in and bit that thumb up in his mouth, it started some trouble. Because you see, Rodney kept hold of that string and chased the dog for the reason that he wanted his removable rubber thumb back and the dog had gone and ruined the trick and all. So, Rodney is chasing down the pup yelling these profanities and threats like, “I’m gonna stomp that terrible terrier,” and “rotten fuckin shitball,” and all sorts of inappropriate things considering the kids being around for the magic show.

My girlfriend Em is hollering out, “He’s drunk, he’s drunk.” And that really didn’t help. The intensity of the moment was ramped up is all that did. Other people are saying, “Don’t hurt the dog,” and “he’s just a little guy,” and the kids are screaming and carrying on, they can tell things have taken a foul turn. But I doubt Rodney heard any of it. He really wanted that thumb.

I try to calm Em and tell her he’s not drunk and I’ll take care of it. I really just want to tone down the fervor; the house is frantic. So, I head to the kitchen where Rodney had followed the dog, thinking I can stifle his anger. But before I get there I hear the yelp, we all hear the yelp, and the banging of cupboards and the boots and the stomping, just the general commotion of an angered amateur magician upset with the dog that spoiled his act.

When I make it in, I see the mound of fur, Peanut, is hurt but not dead like I half expected and the “Happy Birthday” banner is tinsel and twisted, partially torn down, hanging by a corner, and there’s Rodney winding the string up around his detachable thumb and paper streamer stuck on his shoulder. He looks over at me with furrowed brows, one arm partially raised, and says, “You believe that damn dog. There’s bite marks all over this thing.” I shake my head telling him he’s gotta go and send him out the back door before Em can reach the scene.

Well, once Em does make it to the kitchen she screams out, “Peanut!” and goes into her hysterics telling everybody the party’s over and to get the hell out, which I thought was pretty rude, I gotta say. She scoops the dog up, calls her boy into the kitchen, and tells him, “Chance, my little man, sorry if your birthday was ruined,” and looks at me all dirty-like. I knew it wasn’t true, I saw how he lit up unwrapping my slingshot, the gift I’d been forbidden to buy a week ago. I try to give him a wink even though I’m lousy at it.

 

It’s the first time we’re in the vet’s office since the incident with our turtle, Lockjaw, who wouldn’t eat, whose shell got all soft and spongy, who Em carried in on the palm of her hand, who made the doc smile weakly when he saw us, a look of pity and embarrassment behind his specs, who when we got home had to be taken out back to be buried under a little pine sapling, a grave marked with crossed popsicle sticks: Here Lies Lockjaw.

The same doc looked down his nose at us this time, into our wide eyes, and told us “looks like our little Peanut took a pretty good kick.” We had nothing to worry about, though, the pup could still walk around he said. But when the dog came creaking out of the back, a set of wheels strapped to his hindquarters like the training device you’d find on a bicycle, his front legs churning away and the rest of him rolling behind, well it sent Em over the edge.

“You piss-poor hack,” she starts screaming at him and it is obvious this catches him off-guard. He’s backing up with his hands at his shoulders like somebody’s pointing a six-shooter at his heart. “You’re telling me we have nothing to worry about,” she keeps going at him with her head whipping around on her skinny frame and her arms flailing around, “Do you know what people are going to think?”

The doctor’s chin is tucked into his neck and he opens his mouth, trying to explain it’s only temporary and is common procedure, I think, but I cut him short with apologies over and over. He can tell I just want to get this girlfriend of mine out of the office.

I pay the bill, nearly a month’s rent, and we head for the exit. The anger resonates in her footsteps and that clenched jaw is a hairpin trigger. She storms ahead of us and I keep the pace in back with Peanut, who squeaks squeaks squeaks down the aisle turning the heads of all the customers. I wave.

The whole drive home I gotta hear about Rodney. How he’s sick and needs help. Em keeps looking over at me quipping these things like, “how can you two be so tight?” and “don’t you just feel so bad for having a maniac like that around those children?” We get to a red light. She grabs my arm and locks in a stare.

“He drinks too much. I don’t want you hanging around him anymore.” She says. And I look right back into her, her face painted pretty and lashes shadowed, I look into those dark wide pupils, black eyes like a killing machine.

“His drinking didn’t seem to bother you when you used to stick those drugs up your nose,” I reply. “It was all fun then, I guess.”

Em lets out this shriek like she’s boiling a pot of water in her chest; it causes Peanut to whimper in the back.

“You’re a sonovabitch, you know that,” she says.

We sit in silence the rest of the way home.

I pull into the driveway; the Chevy rumbles low and deep. Em is out the door with a slam before I can twist the engine off; I help Peanut out of the back seat and let him do his business on the front lawn before leading him to the house, picking his rear wheels up and over the couple stairs in the walkway.

Inside, Em is giving her boy hell for playing video games the entire time we were gone, then clamors up the stairs when she sees me come in; she was having an awful day I knew. I turn the TV off and say, “It’s too nice out, man.”

Coming from the upstairs, I can hear Em’s muffled voice on the phone and her pacing steps. It’s a while before I hear the bedroom door creak open.

Sometimes she can look so delicate when she walks, and this time, her coming down the staircase with an overnight bag in hand makes my bones split and crack apart. I want to crawl inside, I want to displace all of her grief, my head is burning off to be back in the beginning.

“I’m going to visit Amy for the weekend in the Keys,” she says. Her voice drips out just so, as if to say, you remember the Keys of course. And I do remember the Keys and Jorge and the ambiguity. I want to pull off her leg; I want to lock her up in the bedroom, and throw that suitcase back in the closet. I want her to stay.

“What about your boy and your poor Peanut?” I ask.

“Well,” she says, “I figure after the whole birthday fiasco you can have the opportunity to make amends. You know, spend some quality time.” Her red lips stained and she smiles goodbye.

I watch her go out the door. Chance is chasing the few fireflies that have shown up early in dusk, something I haven’t seen a kid do in forever; she kneels down to his level and kisses his forehead. A taxi waits on the curb to take her away. It says ‘yellow cab’ over top a white paint job. And I just don’t understand.

The road twists and winds, snaking its way around avoiding the beam of the headlights, but we follow it nevertheless, in the full, rumbling Chevy. Chance with the case of beer at his feet and Peanut in between us, we’re headed to the hill and the leftover stones from my last project plink around in the truck bed with every bump and turn. If she could only see us now.

Out at the shale pit, or what was once a shale pit, we drive past all the trailers bunched together on the flat meadow, past the broken-down bus that’s been abandoned and tagged, Poppa Waz a Playa, and drive up and up into the dirt and the rock, towards the top. We see the hand-made sign, “The Hill,” and go right on by; the stars are out and clear.

“Hell of a night for a fire,” I say.

“You bet.” Chance smiles; he’s an outdoorsman, or outdoorsboy, whichever, and I know it’s a trait he inherited from his dad, a man that I’ve never met, but when I took Em to the lake with my family, she slapped and itched and when I said take in the autumn leaves and she said, “I can’t wait until autumn leaves, or we leave, this place isn’t for me,” that’s how I know.

We pull over the top and the headlights bounce off the back of a red, rusty Jeep next to Rodney’s pop-up camper. His moped leans on an old, empty oil drum. I give the horn a little honk, and Chance pops the door open; it gives a whine from pushing it wide. We get Peanut on the ground, and he has some trouble negotiating the terrain; he’ll get by and I know he won’t make it far from us.

The tin door on the camper swings open. Rodney steps out, then lets the door slap back with a wobble and crash that sounds like a faulty cooking pan.

“Well, well, look who it is,” he says.

I wave. “Sorry, didn’t know you had company.”

He swats at the comment and points to the fire ring. I nod. We head around to the pile of wood near a wheelbarrow that is slick with evening dew and grab a few logs.

“Whose Jeep?” I ask.

“Oh, that’s Charlotte’s,” he says, “she’s my sponsor,” and he gives me an enviable wink, telling me the program isn’t a complete waste.

He looks over and sees Peanut struggling to get around, dragging his wheels, sliding over the dirt mounds and rocks that are his lawn, and says, “Jeez, you gotta be kidding me,” putting a whiskered face down into his knobbled, leathery hand.

“What’ya trying to do? Make me feel all rotten for hurting that pup. You know I didn’t mean nothin.”

I tell him no, no it’s not like that, and explain I’ve got the two of them for the weekend and point over to Chance, who’s crafting a tee-pee out of wood in the pit. When he hears Em is out of town, he looks at me like I’m trying to pull something over on him.

“The Keys, huh?” he says. “Think she’s going to see your old buddy Jorge?”

I say I don’t want to think about it, even though I have been, and ask how about we get this fire going.

We pull some chairs up; Rodney throws a little kerosene around.

“I got a new one,” Rodney says to us and holds up both his hands, palms first then the backs, to prove to us he’s not using a trick, but we know he must be. He flicks on a cigarette lighter, covers it with another one of his damn detachable thumbs, and it appears as if he pulls the flame off the lighter and carries it with his bare hand. It is a nifty, I have to admit.

Rodney lowers his hand to the tee-pee that Chance has stacked, and with a single touch the flames burst and go up with a whoosh that sends Rodney stumbling back, abandoning all showmanship. A sleeve of his flannel catches, and it takes a minute of flailing and smacking before Rodney can extinguish it, leaving an inch or two of melted, charred cuff around his wrist. We clap anyway, Chance and I, and Peanut looks over like we’re calling for him. All of us settle down around the blaze, watching it lick at the wood with crackling heat.

Rodney hollers out for Charlotte, and she appears, silhouetted in the glow of the open camper door. She is a strange beauty, nothing refined, nothing natural, but striking nonetheless. A cloud of buzzing insects jostle around the hanging apparatus near her head, basking in the perilous blue hum; the unfortunate burn out with an electric pop. Her hair is everywhere and the dress she wears is slightly off-center, tight. Barefooted she staggers our way and the burning cigarette that dangles casually from her mouth bobs around when she says, “Well hello, boys.” And I think, that ole Rodney, what a lucky guy. I give him a grin.

After the greetings and the introductions, we begin to empty the cans of Milwaukee’s Best. Chance gets a hot dog ready to roast on a stick he’s found nearby; I watch him and I admire him, his little fingers working away. Rodney lays a piece of shopping cart on the ring over the flames and turns to Chance, “Now you got a grill.”

When nobody talks, the silence is hypnotic. It’s easy to just stare and feel. The stinging cloud of smoke chokes my eyes red, but I don’t close them because I can see these headlights that are coming, burning up from the dark down below the hill. I hear the crunch and pop of rocks under tires, and I hope for a second for a change of heart, a change of her plans. But when the car motors on by, disappearing as a wisp of kicked-up dirt into the uncharted plateau, beyond our camp, I tilt back my can and take a long pull.

Charlotte, Rodney, and I are more than halfway through the case that none of us should be drinking, and Chance has eaten enough hot dogs to call it quits. I carry an armful of empties over to my truck and pull down the tailgate; I line the cans up like a carnie and fill my pockets with the stones that have been rattling around my truck bed.

I’m walking back from my truck, and I see those faces sitting around, flickering in the effulgence, and the dog and his wheels, and the bugs that chirp and chime in and out of the distant darkness. I look up and lose my memory in the moon. If this were where we lived, we’d be home.

“Well, let’s see what you got,” I say, and drop some stones in Chance’s lap.

He makes a neat pile on his knee and scoots to the edge of his chair. He squints an eye shut and takes aim, pulling the slingshot taut, a little tip of tongue creeping out the corner of his mouth. His fingers release the leather pad with an elastic slap and we all hear the metallic ring of a dented, downed target.

One by one, he picks the stones up and fires them over towards my truck, knocking a can with a hollow clunk each time. Charlotte bounces in her chair and claps with every shot, interrupting the napping Peanut who has snuggled by her feet.

“Woo wee,” Rodney says with a satisfied grin. “A young man with a sure shot like that is gonna make it in this world.”

We keep setting them up and he keeps knocking them down, as dead and true of aim as we’ve ever seen. And I think, if Em never comes back he’ll be mine. If she’s removable, if she can just up and detach at will, what will bring her back. Are these the amends Em spoke of, a lifetime of amends. And when I look at Chance’s concentration, his unyielding glare, I wonder if he’s waiting for her, waiting for Monday, her return just as planned, or if he’d be proud to have me as a guardian if she never arrives, and just as the thought rolls around in my mind, I realize I just don’t know what I would say. I don’t know what I want to say.

And for the rest of our evening, we spend it like this, under the sky on top of the hill listening to the rocks and the cans and the echoes that roll and roll away, wondering if Chance will ever miss.

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Dennis Scott Herbert is a recent graduate of Coastal Carolina University, where he completed his fiction thesis under the guidance of Jason Ockert. His work has been published in Archarios Literary Art Magazine.

KRYPTONITE

By Nick Kocz

Hours after Jill gave birth to our first child, Superman knocked on the door to our maternity room. We were friends, Superman and I. The previous day, he foiled one of Lex Luther’s diabolical plots. Now, he swaggered into the room carrying six dozen red roses that he tossed on Jill’s bed as she slept. His archenemy was behind bars again, and you could tell from the way he cocked his head, the squiggle of black hair falling over his forehead, that he was proud—he was a man so proud of his manhood that he could walk freely in broad daylight wearing a bright blue leotard and red cape without fear of ridicule. He was at the top of his game, and the pride that he took in his accomplishments was infectious. If he could foil criminal masterminds, surely I could handle whatever mundane duties came my way.

“Gee! How you doing?” Superman asked.

I was fine. More than fine. Stephen, my new baby, was resting under bilirubin phototherapy lamps in the hospital nursery to treat the peachy tinge of neonatal jaundice, a condition of no lasting consequence. The birth was an especially long one, Jill’s water breaking 48 hours before Stephen crowned. Just standing next to her all that time was exhausting. And exhilarating. What I did was nothing compared to the push push push that Jill went through. She perspired tremendously from the strain and I wiped the sweat from her head, held her hand, and massaged her thighs, which were constantly cramping.

“You held her hand for two days?”

“It was wonderful. And then seeing Stephen come out. It’s just . . . ” I couldn’t describe the elation. Above Jill’s bed hung a framed Thomas Kinkade poster of a gas lamp-lit cobblestone village. Before Superman arrived, I had been imagining how satisfying it would be to take up residence in one of those serene Kinkade cottages, snowflakes falling outside our windows as we gathered inside around the fireplace to roast marshmallows and drink cocoa. I wanted that kind of idyllic existence. Never had I felt closer to my wife. “I can’t describe the feeling. It was wonderful. That sounds so sappy, doesn’t it?”

“That’s swell!” Superman picked up one of the complimentary parenting magazines that the hospital supplied and rifled its pages. We had kept in touch for years, Superman and I. He’d call my office to get together for lunch or dinner, maybe a round of drinks or take in a ballgame, things we’d been doing since our college days. This continued even after I married Jill. He’d call and we’d go out, but sometimes work or Jill would get in the way and I’d have to decline. Still, we kept in touch. Constitutionally immune to complexity, his favorite expressions were “Great!” “Swell!” and “Super!” Once, in an awkward effort to update his vocabulary, he told me that my blue-and-red striped necktie was “Stellar!” and then looked sheepishly from side to side until he asked, “Is that how they say it? Stellar?” I assured him that that was indeed how they said it, but never heard the word again from his lips. “Did I tell you how I foiled Lex Luther? X-Ray vision sure comes in handy.”

Just then, a nurse—Nurse Namoff—entered the room and gave a start when she saw the roses covering Jill’s bed. The way she reacted, it was as if she thought the flowers posed a deadly threat. She wore the kind of folded white cardboard nurses’ hat that I would have thought went out of fashion with Clara Barton. A white smock hid all but the pleated skirt of her brown dress. She scowled at the flowers, and then pivoted around to face Superman, before announcing, “Official hospital visiting hours for the day are over.”

“But this is Superman,” I said.

Nurse Namoff let out a sigh. Of course she knew it was Superman. The way she sneered, touching her forehead, made me feel suddenly the dunderhead for pointing out the obvious. Who else would have a large yellow “S” emblazoned on the chest of his blue superhero costume? She raised her wrist, ostensibly to look at her watch. “Well. Maybe he can stay a few minutes more.”

“That would be great!” Superman said. “I’d love to stay here a few more minutes!”
Nurse Namoff glanced at him. “I’m sure you would.”

Jill shifted in her sleep, rolling against the metal restraining bar on her hospital bed. Earlier, we played with the bed’s controls—raising her head, lowering her feet, and tilting her this way and that as if the bed were a funhouse ride—when the same nurse who now wanted to exclude Superman from our room scolded us. Now Nurse Namoff adjusted the thin green hospital blanket over her patient, but it was no use: a moment later, Jill awoke, throwing off her blanket.

“Congratulations, ma’am!” Superman said, his voice a rich baritone that imparted compassionate authority. Jill brightened instantly. From somewhere in the room came a breeze that unfurled his red cape. Even Nurse Namoff was impressed. I used to think that only Mary Tyler Moore had the power to turn the whole world on with her smile but Superman had it too, that positive energizing vibe. Had there been a speeding bullet in our vicinity, surely he would have stopped it.

“Do you want to see your baby?” Nurse Namoff asked.

“Stephen,” I said, saying his name for the first time. While Jill had slept, I filled out the official paperwork. We had agreed upon the name beforehand, but I still felt guilty for squeezing her out of that momentous process and taking it upon myself to sign the documents.

“That’s a swell name!” Superman said.

Nurse Namoff excused herself to get Stephen from the nursery. Though still waking, Jill was alert enough to attribute the roses scattered on her bed to Superman, knowing that spectacular gestures were his forte. She held one of the buds and sniffed it, a pleasing smile coming over her face.

To my surprise, Superman blushed. “You guys are so lucky! I mean, really. I bet you are going to have lots of babies.”

Jill winced. “Lots?”

“You won’t want Stephen to be an only child, will you?” Superman said.

“You were an only child.”

Superman’s eyes widened. “Hey! I was! Wasn’t I?”

Nurse Namoff returned, wheeling in Stephen, who was asleep in what appeared to be a Plexiglas tote on top of a stainless steel cart. Moments after his birth, nurses had recorded his weight as eight pounds six ounces but already, bundled in blue flannel swaddling blankets, he seemed bigger. Lest there be any confusion about his gender, a blue knit ski hat that proclaimed, “I’m a boy!” engulfed his head. A blue balloon was tied to one of the cart’s steel legs. I’d been wearing the same oxford shirt for three days, ever since Jill called me at the office to say her water broke, and that oxford shirt, while wrinkled, was also blue. We were boys—Stephen, Superman, and I—and I wanted to believe we’d be boys for the rest of our uncomplicated boy lives, hanging out together and doing boy things like repairing engine head gaskets on refurbished Fords and afterwards sitting on a couch and gnawing the meat off chicken wings while watching baseball games and debating why, exactly, there just aren’t many stellar middle relievers anymore.

“He’s great!” Superman said. The force of his exuberance was such that the Thomas Kinkade poster shook in its frame above Jill’s bed. “Say! Can I hold him?”

Bundled as he was in his swaddling blanket, Stephen looked like an otherworldly blue mummy. Jill bit her lip. I could see that she wanted first crack at holding Stephen, but reluctantly she gave her assent, nodding.

As soon as he lifted Stephen from the cart, Superman wobbled backwards. And then Superman looked at me, scared. He tried to laugh, but perspiration broke out over his forehead. He staggered back a few steps and plopped into a chair. His breath was labored, raspy. He wiped his brow with the tail-end of his red cape. “He’s heavy. Really. He’s heavy.”

Stephen slumped awkwardly onto Superman’s lap. Earlier, Nurse Namoff had cautioned us that, “a baby’s neck muscles are not developed enough to support the weight of his head.” When holding him, care had to be taken to support his neck with one hand while cradling the body with the opposite arm. Superman, apparently, knew nothing about proper baby-holding techniques. Stephen’s head flopped to one side.

Seeing this, Jill turned to me and gasped. “Jack, the baby.”

Normally keen to people’s concerns of imminent danger, Superman rested his head in his hands in a manner that oddly reminded me of how my father had looked the day I came home from high school and found him alone at the kitchen table clutching a teaspoon. His hair had started to gray the previous autumn, but until that afternoon it hadn’t registered on me that my father was getting older. I thought he’d forever be a young man. He had just been laid off from the Chevy plant on Delaware Avenue. Mom wasn’t home yet from her own job at the SuperMart, where she sliced bologna and head cheese behind the deli counter. I said hello to Dad three times, but, caught in a trance, he didn’t stir. Finally, I asked if he wanted to throw the football around with me, and he jerked his head up and dropped the teaspoon against an empty saucer and said sure, but when we got outside, he grabbed a baseball from the grass and we threw that instead.

“Superman,” I said.

But Superman didn’t respond.

Stephen sat precariously on Superman’s knee, his head wobbly and unsupported.

I became aware of Nurse Namoff rushing across the room, the pleats of her brown dress billowing out as she swept around me. Perhaps I too was caught in a trance. I wanted to believe that Superman would never let harm befall any person, but then the nurse relieved Superman of the baby and our baby whimpered and I looked at Superman, his arms muscular but inert like steel beams weighing him to the chair.

“He’s all right,” Nurse Namoff said, rocking the baby in her arms. Stephen squiggled, momentarily exposing a foot through the folds of his swaddling blanket. “You’ve got yourself quite a lively fella. You know that?”

A call came over the hospital intercom paging a certain doctor. All of us looked at each other as if it were our names being called. And then Nurse Namoff said, “Perhaps you’d like to allow the new parents some alone time?”

The nurse’s words took a few moments to register on Superman. He expended great effort just to raise his head. Red welts, the telltale sign of a bad case of hives, appeared on his face. He scratched one of them and studied the fluid that oozed from it onto his fingernails. If I didn’t know better, I would’ve guessed he was suffering from a hyper-allergenic reaction—but Superman didn’t have allergy problems, did he? “So visiting hours are over?”

Nurse Namoff straightened the pleats of her dress. “They have been for a while.”
Superman nodded. I half-expected him to open the window and take a flying leap. Indeed, I was looking forward to him shouting, “Up! Up! And away!” but instead he got up and walked. Because he was in costume, he wasn’t wearing shoes, and when he walked, his footed heels slid across the gray tiled floor. “Should I close the door?” he asked.

“Yes,” Nurse Namoff said. “I think you might.”

“I’ll be seeing you,” he said. He waved, unenthusiastically, and then closed the door behind him with as little noise as possible.

Stephen had apparently soiled his diaper and, while Jill remained in bed admiring her roses, Nurse Namoff took it upon herself to give me a diapering tutorial, telling me to place the new diaper beneath Stephen while he was still wearing the old one. With luck, Nurse Namoff said, he’d be potty trained within twelve months. Then she pinched her nose. “Until then, good luck.”

“He looks like you,” Jill said, meaning the baby and me. “Don’t you think?”

I snatched the old diaper out from under him, then folded the new one over his private parts, and only then did I realize that I positioned the diaper backwards.

Stephen didn’t look like me. What she really meant was that he looked like the photographs of my father that she had seen. Because of what happened, I knew better than to ask that we name our child after him. What was amazing was that his union life insurance policy paid the claim after the bus incident. No one was convinced that it was an accident, least of all the wiry bus driver who chewed tobacco and spat out the juices into a Styrofoam coffee cup all during the inquiry. There was no reason for my father to be standing on the street corner at that hour of the morning. He had long ago given up job-hunting; most days, he didn’t wake until well after I left for school. According to the driver, my father timed his stumble into the street perfectly to afford maximum impact and the least chance for survival. That’s how the driver, spitting out more brown juices, described it: “a calculated stumble.” Without that insurance pay-out, I never would have been able to go to college.

Diapering was no easy task. The adhesive tabs at the hip ends of the disposable diapers were supposed to fold over the mid-section of the diaper, securing it onto our baby. Yet somehow I pulled too hard and tore off the tabs, rendering the diaper useless. As I did this, Stephen studied me with what I took to be the superhuman intensity of a future Nobel Prize winner. Hours earlier, when I first held Stephen, I was startled by his magnificent azure eyes, the gaze they cast; there was a power to that gaze that I couldn’t describe, simpatico yet searing. It was like he had the power to look right through me. I didn’t quite know what the Nobel Prize was, but I just knew he had that kind of brute mental force.

*

Superman visited us twice in the first week that we brought Stephen home. Both times, he stood in the nursery doorway, his hands on either doorjamb as he gazed at Stephen with such concentration that I was sure he was using his x-ray vision. You could tell he desperately wanted to get closer, Superman did, but it was like something was holding him back. Stephen’s neonatal jaundice disappeared, but he developed a bad case of colic—which Jill said was because I wasn’t bottle feeding him right. He had a latching problem, so I’d feed him milk that Jill pumped into bottles. Jill tried to be helpful, saying that I should not hold the bottle at too steep an angle, which prevented him from getting proper tongue traction on the latex nipple. Then she said I held the bottle too close to him. Or I was holding the bottle too tightly. And maybe I wasn’t burping him right either, because, as she said, “burping can be tricky-tricky.”

Some nights there’d be a phone call. Jill would answer because I’d be saddled with Stephen, feeding him. In the moments when Stephen wasn’t crying, I’d hear Jill explain that I couldn’t be interrupted right then. Sometimes the caller would persist—which led me to believe that it was Superman who was calling, for he was nothing if not persistent—and her tone became scathing. When she wanted, she could be downright rude. “Listen, pal, don’t you go bothering him. I tell you he’s daddying.”

Maybe that’s what I was doing—daddying—but it seemed like all I did was upset my son. He looked to be in physical pain. Nothing I did made it better. He’d close his eyes and wail, his nose wrinkling, his skin pinkening, both his hands balled into little fists that he shook wildly. It was hard not to take his frustration personally. His eyes would snap open, taking me in as if he were passing judgment against me.

I meant to return Superman’s calls, but Stephen wouldn’t tucker out until 3 a.m., leaving me with precious few hours to sleep before I had to wake up spry for my office job. We lost touch, Superman and I. When he did catch me, he’d suggest happy hour or a ballgame, things we used to do together. I’d sigh into the phone, thinking of the good old days—how, before the baby, Jill wouldn’t mind if I went out once in a while—but now, with obligations at home, I had to decline his invitations.

“So what do you think about this crime wave we’re having?” Jill asked one night. She passed me two bottles of milk she had just pumped. Her milk always amazed me, how warm it was fresh from her breasts. Through the clear bottles, it had the color of daisy petals. It didn’t seem real.

“Crime wave?”

Since Stephen’s birth, I hadn’t paid attention to the news, but now Jill showed me the Daily Planet newspaper articles. Banks all over town were getting robbed. On consecutive days, the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd National Banks went down, the robbers always getting away in a black 1937 Packard. You would think a 75-year-old vehicle would be easy to find in Midtown, but the police were stumped. Criminals were breaking out of jail and solid citizens were turning to a life in crime. Stockbrokers ruthlessly shattered convenience stores’ plate glass windows and ran off with inventories of malt liquor and ridged potato chips. The word was out on the streets: Superman was out of the crime-stopping game. After nabbing Lex Luther, Superman responded to exactly one distress call: a tabby cat had wandered onto the roof of one of the gloriously colored Victorians on Wellsberry Hill and the elderly occupant of that house worried that the cat couldn’t get down without assistance. That much, utilizing an extension ladder, Superman could handle. Nothing in town was working the way it ought. Years of reliance upon Superman had allowed city commissioners to divert resources away from the police force, which now no longer had the manpower or training to combat this wave of wanton stockbrokers.

Curiosity got the better of me. The next time Superman called, I jumped on his invitation to go out. What he wanted to do was go bar-hopping, not to pick up chicks but because of the introspective qualities afforded when languishing on a padded stool in a smoky room as the barkeep tallied up the night’s total in the moments after last call.

“What gives?” I asked when I met up with him.

We were sitting at the oak bar at Delancey’s Lucky Province, the air gray with cigarette smoke in open defiance of the city’s ban on public smoking. Superman stared into his Guinness. A bruise, purple and ringed with a greenish glow, glared luridly on his chin. I had set my cellphone to vibrate, and now it was rattling the small change in my pocket.

“Do you remember, ‘Up Up And Away’?” Superman asked. Because he was widely ridiculed in the media, he no longer pranced about town in his classic blue spandex superhero costume. The Daily Planet ran a front-page editorial featuring his picture under the headline “Dereliction of Duty.” “Wanted” posters were pasted on lampposts. He needed a disguise. That evening he was dressed in a gray flannel suit and a blue-and-gold silk necktie; to my mind, he looked suspiciously like a stockbroker. Women eyed us from the corner booth but, from where he sat, I doubted he could see these cute office workers in smart-cut skirts and bold-colored knit tops. He took off his brown fedora and played with the dent in its crown. Like Superhero costumes, you just don’t see many fedoras nowadays. Whether the girls were appraising us for possible romantic encounters or thinking of phoning in a Superman sighting to the police, I was not sure.

“Those were swell, my Up Up And Away days. So, gee, yesterday I’m sitting on my deck. Police sirens blared in every direction, bursts of gunfire going off. So I figured, wouldn’t it be neat to get back in the game?” He took another sip from his Guinness and set the glass back on its cork coaster. “Up, up and away and all that.”

Suddenly he jumped off the stool and assumed the posture: one arm raised to the sky, knees bent to a semi-crouch, his powerful feet ready to push off. His eyes were glassy, as if he were no longer here in the bar but up in the sky whisking through clouds. Although he said he hadn’t been working out lately, the sight was impressive. He thrust out his chest and shouted, “Up, Up and Away!,” his voice booming.

I thought he was really going to do it: take off flying. All twenty people in the bar, including the deejay setting up his equipment, turned to look. One of the women in the corner booth, the brunette with the dangling star-shaped earrings, raised her cellphone. I couldn’t tell if she was taking his picture or dialing 911. He held that incredible posture for several seconds and gradually I became aware of the silence overtaking the bar, everyone still staring at him, their mouths agape, and my excitement turned into embarrassment for my friend.

“So what happened?” I asked.

“I leapt up maybe five feet. It felt awesome! Is that how they say it nowadays, ‘awesome?’”

“That’s all?”

“Then I fell down. Whacked my head on the side of the deck.” His fingers traipsed over the bruise on his chin so gingerly that I could tell it still hurt. “That’s how I got this. I leapt up again but it was no better. Something was pulling me down.”

My phone vibrated again in my pants pocket. Jill was trying to track me down but, by my reckoning, I still had an hour maybe less to get home before Stephen’s next feeding.

“I keep thinking of your baby, how I’m letting him down.”

“How are you letting him down?”

“I keep thinking of his face. He’s perfect.”

I hadn’t told Superman about the problems we were having: Jill’s pumping and the baby’s failure to latch properly, the nightly ritual of him throwing tantrums and me unable to soothe him. I was still perpetuating the myth of our baby’s perfection, telling grocery store cashiers and the Asian woman who worked at the dry-cleaners how great he was; anything less would have been a betrayal. The previous night his colic had become so violent that he threw up Jill’s breast milk on me. Twice.

Just before we left the hospital, Nurse Namoff pulled me aside. She already sensed that Stephen might be too much for us to handle. Jill was in a wheelchair, orderlies rolling her toward the elevator. The hospital had this policy that discharged patients could not leave on their own power but had to be given a wheelchair ride to the exit. Something about indemnities. I lingered behind, getting a last look at that cobblestone Kinkade village. Brilliant yellow coronas haloed each street lamp on the poster while snowflakes the size of marbles tumbled through the air. Puffs of smoke issued from the cottage chimneys. “Some babies are more challenging than others,” Nurse Namoff said. I hadn’t expected her to be so frank. All the while I had looked upon her as some kind of hospital automaton, someone who recorded temperatures and dispensed stiff but courteous wisdom. She looked at me as if to gauge whether I understood the severity of her implication. “Listen, it’s your job to support your wife through this.” I nodded. What else could I do, my hands weighted down with a suitcase and our new breast pump?

“I could never have something so perfect,” Superman said. Incredibly, he was choking up.

“You okay?”

“You have your daddying. It must be so nifty, isn’t it?”

“Nifty?”

He looked at me as if I were stupid, gulped the rest of his Guinness, then turned around and glowered at the women. How he knew they gawked at him was beyond me. The brunette’s face crumpled. She let go of her phone, dropping it into a pitcher of pale ale. Another girl at the table, a blonde with wavy hair, plunked down a twenty-dollar bill next to the pitcher while the rest gathered their fabric handbags and jackets, the brunette wrapping a wool scarf around her neck even though the weather outside was mild. Soon they were gone and when he turned his attention back to me, a fiendish pleasure lit his face. He pushed the fedora over his head, crumpling the dent that he had so carefully prepared. “They were mocking me.”

“So?”

“Don’t you see?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. The phone vibrated again in my pocket. Pretty soon I was going to have to leave. In less than an hour, Stephen was going to throw up on me again. And again.

“Answer your phone, Jack,” Superman said. Somewhere along the way, he had lost the wonder, the charity, in his voice. It had only been a few months since he put away Lex Luther, but already he viewed himself as a has-been. He made a scribbling motion to the bartender. He wanted to get the tab. “At least you have some purpose in life.”

Many years ago, my father took me to a bar. It was my seventeenth birthday and although I was still underage, he wanted to buy me my first beer. Lucky’s Cellar was neither underground or oozing of fortuitous charm. What sunlight that bleared the windows cast a speckled pall over the establishment; it was a place that surely must have looked better at night. This was the first time in months that I had seen my father so animated. Most days, he just sat on the sofa. Out of work then for two years, he ordered a Genesee Cream Ale draught for himself and had the barkeep fetch me a bottle of Molson’s. In Buffalo, Canadian brews were the only imported beers most bars carried. There was the snap of billiard balls ricocheting off each other in the Lucky’s back room. The barkeep scrutinized me, sizing me up, but he wasn’t about to question a man’s word that his son was old enough to drink and soon my father toasted my birthday, clinking my bottle with his glass. The three other guys in the bar snapped to attention. I realize now that, hearing the toast, they were hoping that my father might spot them a round, but at the time I took their sudden interest in my birthday as a sign of respect: for my father, if not for me. There was pride in my father’s voice. Though he could not afford to buy anyone (myself included) another drink, he told everyone that I was going to go to college and “be something more than a laid-off rear axle man.” It seemed like a pipe dream. College cost money. The previous month, we sold the television for grocery money. He declared that I was going to have a purpose in life, but when he said this, what he meant was that this purpose—sending me off to college—had become his purpose. The next morning, he stepped in front of the charging bus.

Superman lowered his head. Outside, another police siren blared, followed by the cry of an ambulance. “Go ahead. Answer it. Tell your wife how lucky you are.”

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Nick Kocz’s stories have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Florida Review, Mid-American Review, Waccamaw, and Web Conjunctions.

BEACH BLITZ VI

By Michael Fischer

The day before the last Beach Blitz fishing trip, we practice-casted our donated surf rods on the children’s ward lawn. Beach Blitz was a tradition that would end when Mid-State Psychiatric closed in the winter and we were shipped to group and foster homes, or other hospitals not yet condemned by the feds. Jeffers, our favorite healthcare tech, sat on the cracked stoop yelling pointers when not laughing or supping his Styrofoam black coffee.

“See that blade of grass yonder with a cricket on its stalk?” Royce said. “I’m gonna hit it.”

Royce whipped his rod. The line whizzed and the Egyptian pyramid sinker smacked the cricket’s dome.

“Good’un,” Jeffers said.

“Dude’s dead,” Royce said. “Your turn.”

I pretended my rod was a catapult. I’d seen the filmstrip in Hospital School about trench warfare and catapults launching grenades across enemy lines. We watched the filmstrip after reading the best book ever, All Quiet on The Western Front. Hospital School would’ve been better if we’d always read war books and watched the filmstrips afterward, or if classes weren’t held in the basement cafeteria where teachers talked over clattering pots and pans.

“Dang,” Royce said. “You slow.”

“I’m loading up,” I said, and checked my Trilene knot and Egyptian pyramid sinker. Jeffers taught us fishing knots out of a falling-apart book his father gave him. The book sat on the day room shelf with half its pages missing and the cover stained with state grape juice.

“Fire in the hole!” Royce said.

I flung hard, but the Egyptian pyramid sinker snapped off the line sideways into Jeffers’ head. He dropped his coffee, groaned, and held his forehead. A brown stream leaked from the stoop and his Styrofoam cup rolled in the grass.

“You blinded Jeffers!” Royce said.

I really thought I’d blinded him. I’d heard of fishing accidents where lures popped back into the caster’s eyes and doctors filled the socket with glass.

“It’s okay,” Jeffers said, and laughed, and then Royce and me were laughing too. Jeffers rubbed his forehead and asked us to follow him upstairs to the nurse’s station.

“Mrs. French will patch you up,” Royce said.

“Need more than that,” Jeffers said.

The welt was a humongous red bulb.

“Mrs. French will do you right,” Royce said.

I could tell Royce enjoyed looking after Jeffers, since Jeffers usually looked after us.

“Let’s go,” Royce said, opening the door for Jeffers and me, then screaming up the stairwell for Mrs. French.

Jeffers smiled.

 

We never made Beach Blitz VI, so Beach Blitz V, which was before my commitment, was the last Beach Blitz. The hospital canceled the trip due to lack of funds.

“It’s my fault,” I told Jeffers and Royce the next morning in the day room.

We sat with the rest of the boys, all of us dressed to go on a canceled fishing trip at five a.m. Jeffers’ forehead was patched.

“Huh?” Jeffers said.

“I liked to have blinded you. They probably said, imagine what could happen at the beach!”

“It ain’t your fault,” Royce said.

“He’s right,” Jeffers said. “Funding issues.”

The other boys agreed. “It ain’t your fault,” they sang, like a chorus, and Royce turned to a Saturday morning fishing show.

“This one’s my favorite,” he said. “Dude knows all the spots and holes.”

I pulled the falling-apart book from the shelf and read the back cover. The author was a Scoutmaster. He’d dedicated the book to his scouts and ended with a verse from Matthew—Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.

“What are you doing?” Jeffers asked.

I tried to read the verse aloud, but my voice cracked at “follow me—” and the rest of the pages fell to the roach-powered floor.

“It ain’t your fault,” the chorus sang.

I picked up the pages and imagined a beach or pond where my casts never missed their mark.

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Michael Fischer’s work has appeared in several national print and online journals, and his most recent work is forthcoming in Phoebe and Natural Bridge.

WHAT IS A BEEHIVE HAIRDO?

By John Zeugner

At his first luncheon in Keio University’s Hiyoshi campus faculty cafeteria Moran slid into a series of dislocations. He noticed a slight, short professor wearing a Harris tweed jacket despite the late September heat—that was off-target enough, but, more significantly, the fellow sported a bow tie, the first Moran had seen on any Japanese academic. More unpredictably still, the fellow took his tray and walked directly to the nearly vacant table at which Moran was seated. It was clear he meant to engage Moran. Either he was a Tokyo Red Army lunatic who intended to butcher Moran, or, more likely, he had some very pressing linguistic inquiry.

“I’m Kondo-sensei,” the fellow said, “can I ask you a question?”

“Of course,” Moran answered, “please sit down.” Moran had not encountered a Japanese professor who ignored de rigeur introductions and additionally referred to himself as sensei. He wondered if he should have answered, “Hi there, I’m David Moran, Ph.D. Call me Doctor.”

Kondo sat down, then neatly lifted the teishoku luncheon slowly off this tray: Miso soup bowl, a tiny dish of pickled radishes, a large bowl of rice, and a small oval plate of apparently burned pork strips. Once those items had been arranged in what appeared to be a pretty careful semicircle, Kondo turned to Moran and asked, “What is a beehive hairdo?”

The query sent Moran’s mind scrambling. He remembered his first day at Keio’s main Mita campus, a colleague cornered him in the common room and remarked: “I’ve heard that a good speech in America is to say, ‘Tell it to the dragon puppet.’ I’ve heard that it’s a very popular expression in New York. Is it so?”

After an appropriate moment of reflection, Moran decided on a simple “Yes.”

Kondo elaborated: “You might be wondering why I am asking. It’s because I’m a professional translator and I have to produce Tom Wolfe’s Mauve Gloves by next week, and he has so many American expressions. I don’t know what a beehive hairdo is. Please help me.”

Moran set his chopsticks across his own soup dish, put palm heels into his eyes and then slowly dragged them down his face. Kondo leaned toward him to catch the explication as Moran said, “It’s a kind of automatic handgun that fires a 15-round banana clip. It sends its bullets spiraling, spinning as they tear into someone’s head, yielding a spiral arrangement of the victim’s hair. Thus the slang expression ‘beehive hairdo’ to describe a really vicious murder weapon.”

Kondo lifted his miso soup bowl so that Moran was pretty sure the bowl concealed Kondo’s smile. His eyes twinkled as he slurped the soup in.

Trying to keep the joke alive, Moran continued,” It’s a Detroit expression, very popular with black gangsters in that city.”

Kondo set the bowl back down. “I think you can really help me,” he said beginning to laugh. “But maybe you need to see the tattoos on my back.”

Moran added, “And the amputated fingers on your left hand too?”

“Yes, yes! I work for the Yamaguchi-gumi when I’m not teaching.”

“So we know each other’s stereotypes,” Moran said, “care to ask your question again?”

Kondo answered by producing a neat listing of terms to be translated: 1) beehive hairdo; 2) terribly butch; 3) off-hand; 4) somewhat Low Rent; 5) a grim nut; 6) Prince Valiant cut.

He slid the list over. “I notice you come to Hiyoshi campus on Tuesdays. We can lunch every week and you can help me.”

“But why would I help you?”

“To foster international good will among allied nations. Or I could pay you. Also I could show you the real Japan.”

“Something beyond Mt. Fuji and geishas, something more real than zen gardens?”

“Yes. How about a live sex show near Shinjuku station? You could participate, if you wanted to. But it’s better just to watch. Or maybe a concert. Uchida is coming to Tokyo Hall. I have tickets.”

“I admire Uchida.”

“Yes, she is truly superb, but not ichi-ban. It’s settled then. Explain me the list, while we eat.”

2.

On the next Tuesday Kondo said, “I don’t remember what you said about ‘a grim nut.’ You eat nuts don’t you?”

“I’d have to see the context. But I think he means something is very difficult to solve.”

“Like trying to bite into a Brazil nut?”

Moran paused and then said, “Yes, exactly.”

“I will leave it out–elide it. That’s something my editor said I should do more often.”

“Yes, let’s do it now.”

Kondo looked irritated as he produced another list and a ticket for Uchida’s concert.

“Next I’m doing Martina Navratilova’s autobiography. I will bring my daughter to the concert. She played tennis in university. She’s helpful translating.”

“Will you translate at the concert?”

“Perhaps. There’s almost no time left. Also, I’m trying to keep her away from her awful husband.”

Moran looked at the latest list, yielding more time to formulate a response to Kondo’s surprising declaration of a daughter in marital trouble. The most disturbing thing about Japan, Moran had decided, was the proclivity of certain dysfunctional Japanese to reveal personal information casually and immediately, as if speaking English released them from the forms of usual Japanese conversation. Moran had discovered that to speak Japanese well was to lapse into structured responses so that sentences fit expected patterns of discourse, and templates of revelation rigidly followed predicted lines.

To speak well meant everybody knew what was being said. English expression detonated those strictures. It also crossed Moran’s mind that ‘awful husband’ might have been meant as praise. Maybe nothing more than a confusion between “awesome” and “awful.” One of his brightest graduate students had told him once as the capper to a discussion of composers, “I like Mahler either,” meaning, apparently, “also.” They both had laughed at the slip. But Moran decided the grimness of Kondo’s tone ruled out confusion over the terms of praise.

“When you say awful, what do you mean?”

“I mean he beats her and is seldom in the house,” Kondo answered.

“Sounds like a very Japanese marriage,” Moran said, and immediately regretted.

“He’s not Japanese. He’s Philippines. Now he’s in Luzon, so she can come out with us. He doesn’t want her to spend time with her father.”

“That must be hard for you.”

“Harder for her,” Kondo said, taking out a handkerchief and pressing it to his nose—another startling gesture for a Japanese. You never blow your nose in public. Moran realized it was an attempt to stop tears, an embarrassing cover-up, actually one of the terms on Kondo’s newest list along with: 1) dust-up; 2) cover-up; 3) lickety-split.
As Moran studied the list, Kondo said, “Here’s the ticket. We’ll meet you in front of the second gold door in the lobby.”

“Real gold?”

“Of course not. Besides, it’s not really a door, just a gold-painted panel, but you can see it easily from the lobby.”
Moran answered, “I know exactly what lickety-split means.”

3.

Before the golden panel it seemed they were of equal height-–a generationally askew perfect couple, sartorially out of place amid the black-suited concert-goers. Vulnerable in the dark wave of predictable audience. Kondo, still in blue heather Harris tweed, and his daughter in an oddly long yellow dress, with a steel-colored jacket, and a black tote bag.

When Moran got to the top of the maroon-carpeted steps, he pointed to her bag and asked, “Holding Papa’s translations?”

She covered her mouth in mock humor embarrassment, and Kondo said, “My daughter, Mayumi, Professor David Moran. He is instrumental in my work.”

“Yes,” Moran repeated, “instrumental.”

“As in piano,” Mayumi said softly.

“Yes,”Moran said, “I’m the Sviatoslav Richter of American slang expressions, taking Kondo-sensei to places he’s never been.”

“You admire Richter?” Mayumi asked.

“Yes, he’s no longer the real ichi-ban, although your father doesn’t agree.”

“I like him so much, too. I wish he were still alive.”

There was an extended moment of deliberate non-eye-contact and then Mayumi said, “Papa, we should go in.”

She sat between them on the left side of the immense hall. Overhead there were slightly tilted white cloth-sheathed panels aimed toward the empty stage. Mitsuko Uchida, imperially thin and moving swiftly as if on casters, glided quickly to the enormous Steinway, cocked herself momentarily directly at the sold-out audience, and bowed energetically, at first fully and then incrementally with shorter and shorter, head-only acknowledgment.

She sat down, adjusted the gleaming ebony knob on the side of her square bench, and waited for the coughs and shuffling programs to silence. As that pause lengthened, thickening the hush until Moran wondered if a ceramic knife could have penetrated the nimbus of quietude. Then magically Schubert’s spare initial notes uncurled that beguiling opening melody out from the piano, rippling, Moran imagined, as an Austrian brook from the highest reaches of mountains near Steyr in that amazing summer which prodded from the chubby, bespectacled composer not only this wondrously enveloping Sonata but also the Trout Quintet. Uchida unfurled the healing, Austrian waters as if to transform grey cloudy Tokyo into some sunlit place with brilliant, icy air. The brook thundered for a moment and then slipped back up the mountains with slow magical, spacious, tentative exploration.

The second movement simply slumbered, as if the brook had found at last a pool of delighted repose. Moran and Mayumi exchanged a look that seemed to acknowledge something special was happening under Uchida’s artistry, something opening between them, among them all, a possibility unimagined so long as the Austrian brook flowed. A brook now so stilled as to propel longing in the imagined sunlight, some gorgeous misty affection linking them all beyond translated words, argued-over idioms, toward the new language of shared amazed feelings.

Abruptly in the third movement the brook trickled instantly to life again, pouring from the heights at the edge of the pool down the mountain in cascades of tinkling sound, each repeated cascade thickening, strengthening, then suddenly narrowing back to faintness, only to plunge suddenly full again. How could this gaunt, tiny woman get such roaring sound from the instrument?

At the end Moran and apparently Mayumi wanted to stand up in full cheering, but their lurch was curtailed when only moderate, controlled applause emanated from the rest of the audience. Moran felt the clamp of Japanese social expectation pinning him to his seat. He turned to Mayumi and said not quietly enough, “Deserves better than this.”

“Yes,” she answered, “but she’s Japanese. If she were Russian, they’d be cheering.”

“Yes,” Kondo said, “in Japan the protruding nail gets hammered down, but you knew that.”

“Please, Papa.” Mayumi said. And then as if to deflect from cross-cultural banalities, continued to Moran, “I hoped to meet your wife.”

“I hoped you would too, but Natalie’s work keeps her in America. But she’ll be here by Christmas, I’m certain.”

“It must be lonely for you.”

“Yes. But fortunately Tokyo has lots of distractions,” Moran said, responding to the dulcet quiet tones of Mayumi’s conversation, suddenly imagining that no distraction could equal what he remembered of Schubert’s melodies mixing with the sweetness of her voice and face.

“She didn’t take the repeats in the first movement. Richter always took the repeats, “ Kondo said, determined, Moran decided, to sour the moment. “I saw Richter in Osaka in ‘79. He took the repeats and maybe was softer, more flowing in all three movements.”

“I doubt he could have been more flowing in the third,” Moran said letting an edge show.

“He had bigger hands. He could handle the runs more swiftly.”

“I doubt it,” Mayumi insisted.

“The Japanese have short legs and small hands,” Kondo said.

“But not Uchida,” Moran answered, feasting on Mayumi’s congratulatory nod.

4.

Outside at the taxi queue they were joined by a short, heavily tanned fellow wearing a beige windbreaker and wheeling a carry-on nylon luggage bag. Moran momentarily wondered if the fellow might be Middle Eastern, but Mayumi’s startled, “Anata . . . go shujin (husband) . . .” clarified everything. Moran faced the fellow and thought, he’s small for a genuine wife beater. Nor did he seem so compactly muscular as to command instant obedience. No, this sylph did not fit any preconceptions.

Kondo interrupted the reverie, “Professor Moran, my son-in-law,” Kondo lingered over the phrase as if to underscore its English tarnish, “Wicksburg Mendosa.”

“That’s a terrific name!” Moran blurted out, then, surprising himself, thought about how to take back the remark.

“The mix is pretty common in Manila,” Mendosa answered, “please call me Wick. Even the Japanese can say it easily. I came directly from Narita. I hoped to hear the last piece of the concert, or maybe the encores, but it wasn’t to be.”

“And how was the flight?” Moran said.

“Very long,” Wick answered. “And filled with unhappy babies.” He moved closer to Mayumi and almost it seemed was about to take her hand.

Moran wondered—was this the action of a loving husband or assertive predator? Surely the predator was improperly clothed and physically deficient. Wick was barely Mayumi’s height and he wore a dark loden American track suit and Asics sneakers. His side pack was made of beige canvas (Japanese men preferred black leather) with “John Muir” stenciled on its main compartment. This fellow surely is a flop abuser, Moran thought. He might be reckoned as a closeted sadomasochist, fantasized as holding a riding crop and gesturing toward radiantly black patent-leather shoes, but more likely he appeared as Moran imagined he was, a recent, confused Filipino in Tokyo.

“What is your work in Luzon?” Moran asked, happy to spread the impression of vague hostility in the question.

“Whatever the Lord directs,” Wick answered evenly, sweetly.

“And what did the Lord direct?” Moran said.

“Mostly to staff the St. Catherine of Sienna home for youths trying to leave prostitution. Prostitution is rampant in Manila.”

“So the Japanese sex tours advertise,” Moran continued, testing the parameters.

“ Far less now,” Wick answered.

“Yes, I understand they’re here—as maids and nannies and bar hostesses. Do you work for Catholic charities?”

“For Caritas, the sponsoring organization.”

“The priests are too busy with pedophilia.”

Wick let the remark float among them, as he smiled at Mayumi. Presently the remark broke apart like a too-fragile dandelion blossom.

Kondo seemed to understand the source of Moran’s abrasiveness. He stepped in front of Wick.”Perhaps it’s too early to taxi away from here. Let’s get a nightcap, isn’t that the phrase, Dr. Moran?”

“Splendid idea!” Moran answered, but Wick intervened.

“Actually I’m quite tired. It was a lot of work near Manila, and I’d like to take my wife home so we could get some sleep.” He steered her away from them and moved toward the long taxi line, heading toward the sixth car away from the pickup gate, so as not to offend those still waiting in place. “I apologize for being such a wet blanket. Professor Moran, please accompany my father-in-law and explain my rudeness.”

“Will do!” Moran shouted, “I’ll even explain ‘wet blanket.’”

“I know, ‘wet blanket.’” Kondo said, “but I bet you don’t know ‘wet leaf husband,’ –it’s worse than gokiburi teishu.”

“I know the term,” Moran said, “and it doesn’t apply.”

5.

When they had settled in on the last two stools of the eight-stool nomiya near the concert hall, Moran said, “How can he be a cockroach husband since he’s away so much.”

“Yes, not in the kitchen or the bedroom,” Kondo said.

“You’re too young for a grandchild anyway. And doubtless he doesn’t want responsibilities until he clarifies his career.”

“What career? Helping addicts in Manila? Putting whores on the path to redemption?”

Moran sipped the cold sake from his pewter cup. Something about the pewter added suave depth to the clear liquid. He set the cup down and stroked palms into his eyes. It was mysteriously wonderful how about the middle of October all Japanese bars stopped serving sake cold, as if acknowledging silently an imperial degree to warm the rice wine now. The cold soba noodles disappeared, too; hot broth poured down from Mt. Fuji in a tsunami that drove summer into the far Pacific. For a moment Moran heard his mother’s voice insisting that after Labor Day men must wear black tuxedoes at formal events, didn’t little David know and believe that? By what similar analogy could Moran understand Kondo’s statement that Wick was a brutal abuser? When he couldn’t find the analogy, Moran plunged ahead.

“Why did you say he was brutal to your daughter? I don’t think he’d hurt a fly. On the contrary, he seemed the sweetest, most sensitive and loving fellow. Open, utterly transparent, gentle.”

“Please don’t pile the adjectives up so.” Kondo said. Then he paused, apparently collecting himself into a professorial pose. “I’ve observed that Americans don’t really listen unless they find something that fits their minds. I’ve noticed they’re obsessed by violence and current topics in popular culture. Your Wolfe taught me that over and over again. So I know what’s really important now in America. It’s wife-beating. I knew you’d be listening carefully if I told you that. And even now you want to have me confirm my words. I know you’re disappointed I used your American obsession to recruit you.”

“Recruit? To what?”

“He’s going to take her away with him, back to Manila. To a life of what he calls ‘service’ in the name of his Jesus. I won’t let that happen and I want you to help me.”

“Maybe we should just keep it to translating slang terms.”

“I wish we could, but he’s pressing immediately. We haven’t time.”

“You mean you haven’t time.”

“I need you to help me.”

“She’s his wife. What can you do? Kidnap her?”

“Yes, we could kidnap her.”

“We’ll need duct tape,” Moran said smiling and errantly filling his own pewter cup, in direct violation of the Japanese stipulation–one must pour only for someone else.

“Duck tape?”

“With a ‘t’ not a ‘k’.”

“It makes no sense.”

“Neither does kidnapping her.”

“I know that. I want you to talk to her.”

Moran took a long, slow swallow of the chill sake. Here indeed was temptation—a father offering his lovely daughter. What might intimate conversation lead to? There was a long time till Christmas before Natalie would appear. “Why would she listen to me?”

“Why did she marry a Filipino?” Kondo parried, then answered his question: “Maybe she only warms to foreigners. Plenty of parents warned me about having her study in Southeast Asia.”

“Plenty of parents would warn you about interfering between a daughter and her husband.”

“Not in Japan.” Kondo said emphatically.

The rebuff returned Moran to his reverie. Perhaps on a cooler night there could be a little shabu-shabu dinner, perhaps in Jyugaoka, or better yet in the “American Restaurant,” Moran knew precisely how far it was from the Jyugaoka station—yes, an American-style conversation perfectly attuned to an American-style restaurant. Moran remembered getting a vanilla and chocolate sundae festooned with corn flakes and slivers of cucumbers, as the waiter hastily explained watching Moran’s disappointed expression, that the Kellogs and cukes were strictly American. The task would be difficult. It would have been far easier to extract her from the clutches and cuffings of a hairy abuser. He couldn’t offer a loving retreat from danger. Maybe a secular broadside would turn the trick. She was vulnerable to art, enthralled with music, and while Wick might have enjoyed Bach and Berlioz, surely a surfeit of such magnificence would not fit under Jesus’s servant law, would it? Perhaps leverage there. But leverage toward what? Kondo’s wishes? No, rather the incredibly smooth, eel-like pliancy of Japanese women’s skin, was that it? Memories from massage parlors in Juso, beyond Osaka, came streaming back on pewter rails into Moran’s vitals. It must be Kenbishi sake, Moran thought, and premier grade to revivify such memories.

“You are not listening to me,” Kondo said.

“You’re right. You’re absolutely right. I’ll do it. Set it up. In Jyugaoka. I’ll do it. I’ll convince her. You bet I’ll convince her.”

“Convince her of what?” Kondo asked hurriedly.

“Whatever you want. There’s no God. Jesus was a fraud, an itinerant trapped into believing Old Testament lies about Redemption. All that remains is purchase of stuff and very good sake. This has to be Kenbishi, isn’t it? Kenbishi in pewter cups–that’s the closest we ever get to the real meaning of existence. Charity is absurd. The helpless in Manila deserve to die, and out of sight. You name it, and I’ll convince her. She’s waiting to be convinced. I’m sure of it.”

“We’re all waiting to be convinced,” Kondo said quietly. “Convinced, not mocked.” He paused and pushed over his cup for Moran to fill. “He means to take her away from me. Forever. Don’t you see that? It’s not a joke. She’ll be gone and I’ll have to fly six hours to see her, feel her again. You don’t have a daughter. You don’t understand beyond your silly jokes. I’m not going to let it happen. Do you grasp what I’m saying? I’m not going to let it happen.”

“So you’re going down to Iwakuni and borrow a Marine’s gun?”

“If I have to. I’m not going to let it happen. That’s not just a phrase for translation. Perhaps you couldn’t translate it. I’m not going to let it happen.”

“So, set it up in Jyugaoka and I’ll help you.”

6.

The outside of the American Restaurant was sheathed in mock chrome stripes as if to suggest the place had once been a diner, but that was only a facade. Inside there was a large U of green leather booths elevated approximately a foot above the main floor. Separation was very American, so Moran had been told, and therefore each booth had a faux mahogany partition blocking the view and the conversation to the next booth. Unnecessary, since none of the other patrons would grasp the dulcet English with which he’d work his faux seduction.

There was enough time for him to set up a “bottle-keep” with the waiter in starched beige Bermuda shorts and teal golf polo shirt, and sockless Nike sneakers. At the waiter’s suggestion Moran chose a bottle of Jack Daniels (a favorite of ‘all Americans’ the fellow explained). He poured himself a few fingers in the narrow circular glass filled with perfectly square mini-ice cubes, then bolted down the sweet crisp alcohol. He imagined suavely requesting Mayumi to sit with him on one side of the booth. Perhaps he could blame the request on the noise level of the room. Was it that difficult to hear? He poured another drink and pressed his head to the partition—yes, he could hear the conversation. Ah, sit beside me, Mayumi and let’s review the dangers of love and Catholic liturgy. Most of all, let’s pass well beyond meaningless service in Manila. Let’s contemplate Uchida’s notes and Mayumi’s thighs.

Moran was quietly and lovingly knocking his head against the partition, eyes closed and mind foraging among those Juso massage parlors, when he became aware someone was standing before the booth. Abruptly he opened his eyes and smiled at Wicksburg who partially concealed Mayumi. “Sorry we’re late,” Wick said.

“Ah, hehn! I’m so delighted you both could make it,” Moran said, thrashing about to keep his mouth above water. How had Kondo failed to set it up?

Far from Mayumi clambering into Moran’s side of the booth, the both of them stepped up and sat opposite him.

“It’s great to have both of you here,” Moran said.

“I didn’t want to miss it,” Wick answered with a smile.

They declined drinks but Moran insisted on iced tea for all, and pushed the Jack Daniels to far end of the table, among the condiments. Scrambling, Moran thought about a Jack Daniels and mustard cocktail. He pressed his palms into his eyes and finally said, “Can you tell me about your life in Manila. I mean your life together in the future?”

“We’ll live at the pensione in a third floor apartment. Not much space but adequate,” Wick said.

“Air conditioning?” Moran asked, helpless before its banality.

“No, of course not.”

“Of course.”

The inquiry lapsed, and blessedly, the waiter returned with the iced tea. Moran felt he and Wick were uneasy in the silence, but Mayumi seemed quite at home, slowly unfolding her napkin and delicately placing the heavy silverware in neat position for use. She seemed to enjoy the ritual, and their uneasiness. There was something beguiling in her acceptance of her utterly silent centrality. Moran wondered if Kondo-sensei had stumbled on the term, “cat-bird seat”? Even more impenetrable than “beehive hairdo.” Moran watched her smooth small fingers smooth out the napkin on the Formica for Wick. Moran knew he’d have to unfurl his own roll of implements. Natalie would have dismissed Mayumi’s wifely concern, first with a smile and then if any explanation were offered with a soft-voiced but belligerent recitation against patriarchy.

It was not until they had finished with the double order of fried calamari that Moran returned to his imagined task. The appetizer Moran had ordered without their consent since he had learned that in Japan prior research always superseded personal choice–you took the time to ascertain and plan for your guest’s desires well before the actual event. Else why would you have invited them?

Moran began, “I think Professor Kondo is worried his daughter may find living in the Philippines very different from Japan. The quality of life may be more harsh than she anticipated.” Moran wondered if he and Wick could pretend she wasn’t sitting there.

“Life is easier in Manila,” Mayumi said.

“Oh, I didn’t mean their behavior,” Moran said, worried now about the their. “Just the difference between a first and third world level of development.” He regretted such stupid, ranking language.

“Women have more freedom in Southeast Asia,” Mayumi continued. “We’re not so watched in the Philippines, even if the conveniences are not so heavy.”

“Professor Kondo is worried that his precious and beautiful daughter will be taken away to a very alien place and her bright future subject to depression.” Moran said hastily, as if to distance himself from the sentiment, and aware, too, that he himself was detaching from the conversation, floating above it, removed and impotent.

“When you come to understand and accept God’s will, depression is banished.” Wick said, and such certitude, Moran noticed, seemed not to sit well with Mayumi. Was there an opening there, some possible leverage to pry them apart? And why should Moran serve Kondo’s purposes?

“In America pharmaceuticals are God’s will,” Moran said, but the frolic remark slithered into nothingness before Wick’s sweet demeanor.

“Following Jesus’s example frees you from such concerns,” Wick continued. “In God’s grace those kinds of worries really do recede. Once you get to a certain point whether you tithe at 10% or 100% becomes a silly issue. In the Lord’s grace you truly want for nothing. Wanting itself dissolves. Outside of that grace, Kondo-sensei’s fears are of course real enough, and you should reassure him.”

“I don’t think I can convey that message,” Moran said.

“Don’t worry about the words or what you will say until the very moment. The Lord will give you the words. I know that for sure. Scripture says so over and over again. The earliest apostles were illiterate fisherman, but they converted thousands. The Holy Spirit spoke through them. God will shape your sentences.”

“I don’t know if I want to convert Professor Kondo,” Moran said.

“Then why are we meeting here, having this dinner?” Wick asked. “Only to lead you both to see why Mayumi and I are going back to Manila. To understand the Lord’s purposes in our plan for the future.”

Moran thought: So that’s why we’re meeting! My venality can be dismissed, erased. It occurred only in my stupid, pitiful mind. God’s plan needs acceptance, nothing more. But Mayumi sees deliverance in Southeast Asia from daddy’s oppressive hand in Tokyo, could that be it? And Wick strides forth in absolute certitude of God’s grace and plan, and Kondo is determined to take up a father’s responsibility. And Moran struggles with message delivery, and turns out to be a piss-poor translator, an illiterate fisherman.

7.

At the next relentless Tuesday luncheon Moran accepted his inevitable list from Kondo and said, “I failed utterly. We ate our American-style fried chicken and made small talk and at the end I wished them well on their new life in Manila. I apologize profoundly. I am so sorry.”

“I did not expect you to work miracles. I expected you to see how things were, how set they were, so I could understand what I have to do. And you have succeeded in that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You have strengthened my resolve and clarified my task. It won’t be as easy as I had hoped, but I am more than ever determined. She’s not going to leave me.”

“I think that’s a little unbalanced,” Moran said, but Kondo looked so downcast Moran turned to the list and the lesser intensity of translating peculiar Americanisms.

After surveying the list and finding there a wonderful underscoring item, Moran slowly and rather triumphantly said, “In general the expression ‘at the end of the day,’ means when some action or thought or argument is finally concluded, then some reality must be stated and accepted. Thus we could say, couldn’t we, that ‘At the end of the day Professor Kondo will have to accept the life his daughter has chosen in Manila.’”

“No, ‘at the end of the day, he will insure his daughter’s safety and happiness by keeping her close to him, next to him, holding his hand until the very end.’”

“A lovely thought, and very fatherly I imagine, although I don’t have any children, but entirely too selfish a stance.”

“You Americans know all about selfishness, all right. Your stupid individualism and liberty are pure selfishness. But I’m not in a stance, whatever that word means. It’s not a stance. It’s an action,” Kondo said with remarkable finality.

After a bit of mutual slurping of their miso soups and the downing of clumps of rice, Moran said, “I’m aware of the very Japanese equation of individualism with selfishness, but acceptance of marriage entails something pretty different, don’t you think?”

“She’s not going to Manila,” Kondo answered.

“I really doubt that your conviction can topple Wick’s assertion of God’s plan. Not that I give a damn about either. A plague on both your houses. That’s Shakespeare, incidentally. Not Biblical. I really resent being caught in the middle of this familial shit. Are you familiar with ‘familial shit?’”

“Are you familiar with bakayaro?” Kondo asked.

“I’m not the idiot here.”

“Oh, but you absolutely are!”

For an instant Moran imagined fisticuffs might actually ensue, and that vision of two professors slugging it out in the kaikan cafeteria was healingly comic. Instead, he returned to the list. “I think we’ve dealt with ‘at the end of the day.’ Let’s go on to ‘I’m from Missouri on that,””

But Kondo abruptly got up, took his tray close to his chest and said, “Next week,” and walked away.

“That’s a good illustration of the phrase,” Moran said loudly but Kondo did not turn around.

The rest of the afternoon amid automatic recitation of his lecture to the semi sleeping students Moran kept thinking about being called bakayaro. Did Kondo regret the lack of hostile phrases in Japanese? Alone among the Japanese academics Moran had met it seemed Kondo surely appreciated the limits of his native language–the utter paucity of obscenities, the systematic stuffing of rage expressions, the the linguistic denial of ferocity. You could scream bakayaro or nothing. Since you couldn’t impugn the sanctity of your enemy’s motherhood or express excrement covering his vitals, since description of his evisceration or rape of his orifices was not possible, only the sword of madness could be employed. I cannot tell you my disgust, but I can physically slice you up. There was linguistic self-discipline right to the final second before moral detonation and resulting bloody murder. Was that truly it? Or did linguistic stuffing continue down the slope till final self-destruction? Unutterable hatred turned finally inward?

Such musings carried Moran through the remainder of the week and across the weekend. He worked his way through the list, tightening and sharpening his explications of phrases that required native speaking familiarity. But even Common Room automatic conversations at the main campus hardly engaged him as the imagined next meeting on Tuesday at lunch. For a while Moran was certain Kondo would bring his daughter with him, and she of course would add Wick, and nothing would advance. But what did “advance” mean? On the next Tuesday Kondo did not show up. Moran ate all of his rice, drank all of his soup, consumed every bit of pickled radish and charred pork. He was rewarded for his leisure by the appearance just before his departure of an office lady carrying a narrow envelope. She pointed to the label on the envelope and looked imploringly at him, “For Prof. Moran.” He nodded and tore it open, as she turned away. There was a single small tablet sheet with only one item on the list: “a good bye–it’s a tennis term, isn’t it?”

Moran thought, yes, it’s a tennis term–by dint of your past achievements you were given a pass through an opening round of a tournament and got to watch two opponents fight it out to see who would meet you in the next round. But why weren’t there more items for explication?

An answer appeared in the weekend edition of the Asahi News, a small headline-less paragraph on page 9: “Professor Taro Kondo, a well known translator and professor of linguistics at Keio University, and his daughter Mayumi Kondo, a recent graduate of Ritsumeikan University, plunged to their death in front of an express train at Ikebukuro Station Friday evening.”

8.

For the last weeks of that fall in Hiyoshi, Moran chose a different empty table on Tuesdays. He perfectly understood Kondo would not turn up, but he didn’t believe it. Sitting at the same vacant table seemed sacrilegious, so Moran kept out of the center of the room. For a while he imagined Wick would join him. He surely knew about the “instrumental” Tuesday luncheons, but Wick never came. Moran thought about going back to the American Restaurant, sitting in the same booth and listening for Wick’s easy explanation of God’s Plan and the Kondo suicides. But that seemed too grotesque. Natalie called it a “self-indulgent stunt” when he skyped her suggesting he was thinking about doing that. “Stop confusing puzzlement over their motives with genuine sadness over their loss. Not that genuine sadness has ever really been yours,” Natalie said. “You don’t experience genuine emotions apart from your self-worship.”

“You’re always such a bracing presence,” he answered to the sputtering LED image on his laptop.

But she may have been right. Moran wondered if his sadness, if that was the term, came because he didn’t have Kondo’s weekly pestering to look forward to, or his plotted (but never executed) sweet seduction of Mayumi had never materialized. Indeed had been severed before it even began by Wick’s implacable religiosity, his enviable certainty and its consequent fencing-off of God’s, and his, property. Wick firmly yanked her in one direction and Kondo just as firmly and devastatingly yanked her in another. Moran couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t, believe for an instant that she took the leap with her father voluntarily. His ferocious determination to deflect God’s Plan was perhaps momentarily matched by her ferocious determination to save her father. But body weight determined the tug-of-war and his grasp was greater into express train deliverance. Were they stenciled permanently on the front of the densha screaming through Ikebukero station, or did they thud/smack downwardly to be ground up, sliced and diced by the rubber wheels so that three or more cars scissored them up before the express came to a frenzied halt. Were shreds of Mayumi’s wondrous skin sprayed out from under the blood-spitting wheels?

Would Wick’s Lord merely touch a piece of that skin so as to run the movie backwards and provide greater strength to Mayumi, who pulled her father back onto the platform as the train passed? Moran understood he wouldn’t get a chance to ask Wick that question. Doubtless the very diligent Japanese immigration authorities upon receipt of the newspaper report revoked Wick’s six-month spousal visa and sent him back to Manila. And once there, the nuns and brothers doubtless suggested the healing recitation of a thousand Hail Marys.

But maybe prayers didn’t turn the trick. Mantra recitation proved inadequate and Wick suddenly saw his life as inseparable from the lost sheep his Lord had designated him to “serve.” And thus that Lord retracted invisibly into the vortex of Manila life, merely one more chrome horse mounted on the hood of Jitney existence cruising up and down Roxas Boulevard.

Moran wondered if the Deity’s retreat truly was a comforting scenario. Or should he focus on the inexplicability of the Japanese acceptance of suicide as a viable, honorable path, or on the inexplicability of God’s Plan to shatter Wick’s life? A lovely dual inexplicability, but not one worth wallowing in. Come, sweet Natalie, and yank me out of this very over-heated bath.

But she would not arrive for weeks, and at each luncheon Moran fashioned a conversation with Wick at first letting him explain, as God might, what had happened and why. And then rebutting those arguments while chewing on the inevitable burnt pork strips and then railing against the Lord of Hosts, creator of all reality, redeemer of all suffering, but not, alas, the tearful Wick before him now swallowed up in confused trauma, doubting everything, capitulating to Moran’s remorselessly questioning logic—sobbing as Moran remembered he himself sobbed at age twelve just when he gotten the better of the neighborhood tomboy who had been chiding him, embarrassing him before his seventh grade friends, gotten her down between his knees, and was preparing to batter her wide-eyed, amazed face when suddenly through her rimless glasses he saw her stunned acknowledgement that everything going on was contrived, meaningless, and pointlessly vicious because of some random malevolence winding them up into a parade of idiocy washing them downward, pit-ward, on the chill leading edge of a Schubert melodic brook into oblivion. Was it Mayumi’s or Natalie’s cold hand reaching through the cloudy steel meshing, latching onto his wrist and yanking him clear of express-speed salvation?

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John Zeugner has published short stories in several venues: Ohio Review, December, Perspective, Southern Humanities Review, South Carolina Review, and the anthology SHORT STORIES FROM THE LITERARY MAGAZINES. A recipient of a Discovery Grant for Fiction from NEA, his novel, “Soldier for Christ,” (Wipf and Stock, 2013) will be published shortly.