James Hannah - Sign Languages

But Walliston climbed on the smoking, rattling Chevy flatbed. Smiling and waving, he wedged in between cardboard boxes and a lame family going for medicine or prayer. And since they’d already cleaned and adjusted all the equipment over the last several days, he’d left them a series of level loops they’d saved for just such a time. Small ovals near the village, up to the northwest and down back to the brass cap; they could walk, toting the equipment. But Paddy suddenly produced a quart of Boodles at supper and poured it down like ice water. The next morning, which they supposed to be Wednesday, Paddy didn’t answer the knocks on the sagging door. When Chris pushed it open, Paddy was asleep in a tangle of loosened clothes and split sheets. Two empty bottles in the middle of the floor.

Paddy’s blind drunkenness was unexpected. St. Pauli’s was one thing. How the hell had he managed to hide such a supply of hard liquor? He wondered if Paddy’d been drinking on the sly all along. Chris sat that day and the next morning in his room or in the front room downstairs. The two Chans staring in at the door, the strong light behind them. He wanted to rest here too. For a couple of days. Or for a week. Walliston would sputter and pace but that would pass quickly enough. The Deutschmarks flooded in whether he had his eye to the Gurley or down the throat of a beer bottle.

But on Friday he rose early, the chill of the night on his watch face and the useless keys to the Suburban. Without thinking, he sent Chan #1 home and kept the other, who babbled in patois and ran to the truck to jerk out everything until Chris said no, no, and swore and pushed the too-anxious fellow aside.

There were no mirages in the chill as the two walked the loop out from the tarnished cap. Backsight. Foresight. Break down the light metal tripod. Then level it out again. 4.6. 4.8. The level bubble shifting in the sand. His legs splayed away from the tripod. Chan #2 distorted in the first undulations of heat. He looked, waved, copied his own thoughts. Thoughts in numbers only. He believed that was why he had gotten up in the dark and dressed. The desert had almost sucked him clean by now. Besides the numbers and the blue room at night little remained except the expectations of scenery and images of Deutschmarks falling through blank space. He wondered again, at noon, as they lay behind a desiccated bush, where Paddy’d kept the gin until now. He shrugged and folded his paper lunch bag. The swig of red water still on his tongue.

“So, you married?”

He turned on his side away from Chan #2 and put his arm across his face. He shook his head. But the stocky Chan talked on, more than he ever had before though Walliston liked to rib them, make them say foolish things, and turn to Paddy and him and arch his eyebrows.

“Here, you see this?” There was the crinkle of unrolled paper and Chan #2 held over Chris’s shoulder the poster Chris had pulled down a few days ago. The blue fingernails and shaved pussy a strange sight behind the low brown bush, its leaves almost completely withdrawn, minuscule and waxy.

“I found it, you see. Behind Xiang’s, in rubbish.” Chan #2 laughed and he heard him sit up. The sound of fine falling sand.

Chris turned onto his back, sat up on his elbows. “It’s a picture, that’s all it is. You can have it.”

Chan #2 shook his grinning round face; his teeth were yellow stumps. He smelled of smoke and cheese. His face, his hands on the opened poster motionless. His deferential smile glowed.

To the west they watched a long row of date palms. Underneath them men and camels moved. There were tents billowing in the wind. The whole looming mirage three feet off the ground.

“You know about women I bet. Anyone can see you do. With such pictures.”

“Sure, if you say so. But you can have that… here,” and he sat up and took the woman and folded her carefully, leaving half her face, one terribly lewd eye staring, and put it on Chan #2’s lap. He noticed Chan was missing the top of his left thumb above the knuckle. It ended in a loose tuck of skin that wiggled as he took the poster and looked down into the woman’s face.

They worked on. The heat forcing several rests, spoiling a regular day’s routine. But he said fuck them; fuck Walliston and Paddy. They worked their way back to the brass cap. He looked, read numbers. Recorded them. 4.4. 5.2. 4.9. His eye now seeing the maimed thumb on the side of the rod. The grinning face seen in silence through the heat devils rising up to dance with and tease distances.

They locked the cases in the Suburban. He walked up the street toward the hotel, but Chan #2 pulled at his sleeve. He turned and rubbed his aching eyes. His mind only on beer and the thick stew and sweetened, reconstituted dried fruit.

The broad face too close to him in actuality. “I please ask question?” Chan #2 closed his eyes for a moment. “Mr. Chris… if can?” His smile faltered.

Chris breathed in the town smells. Beyond the last mud brick house and across a tremendous distance he made out the mountains that surrounded the plain.

“What is it? What do you want?”

“You know about women; you married.”

“No, I told you no.”

“I like to ask question.”

Two small boys herded emaciated sheep around them toward the water trough at the lip of the well. The wind picked up and sent the prayer wheels clattering.

“What is it?”

Chan #2 grinned and pulled him across to a low stone wall. Chris sat; the little man sat on his left hip, hunkered close, his head shoulder high.

“I do wrong, you think? What, then, I do? She say no, no, not now, it too late for that, but…” Chan stopped and looked at him, brought his head up, straightened his back. There was no trace of a grin now. He leaned back and began again, slowly, telling how his wife had been eight months pregnant with their first child and how he couldn’t help himself after he’d had too much fun and drink at some sort of card game. He had come home near dawn and the sight of her huge tight belly had driven him wild. He’d pulled her to him. It was awkward, but he hadn’t stopped.

Chris listened and then he stopped Chan #2 with a pat on his shoulder.

“But it the child, too, you see. Little girl already shamed she no boy. But born funny, arms cross chest,” and Chan folded his own. “We massage with oil and say prayers, but them not unfold. Not once in a year.”

“Those things happen.” And he stood and looked down at Chan #2. It was twilight and windy and growing cool. Chris couldn’t imagine any of the women he’d known with bellies full of anything but food and drink. Inside them there was pleasure and noise. They plunged together. Besides, she’d been too old and he’d never wanted anything but the path of least resistance. Exactly what this place offered. With everything cooked off, only the residue remains. And that, in time, would vanish. A path with no resistance.

Chan followed behind him to the hotel. They talked at the door about tomorrow and Chan smiled and nodded. But then he spoke low and quick. “She and baby go to parents, you see, Mr. Chris. What I say to her, you think? You know; such a man as you know.”

He went inside. Paddy was at the table finishing his meal. He never said anything and barely looked up. Instead he exaggerated his actions. Poured the Boodles in high arcs into the coffee mug. The two of them ate goat stew off the Nazi insignias.

In his blue room he heard the wind against the closed balcony doors and he hoped for a storm that would fall over everything. Sand in gin and transmissions. He felt how the howl increased the cold and how the cold demanded thoughts and movements for warmth. He arched his body under the covers, his mind’s eye in the Gurley seeing Chan’s thumb. He crossed his hands over his chest. He put them down at his side. He wanted absolutely nothing for himself. He demanded it.