Michael Martone - Four for a Quarter - Fictions

45

Next come the filberts. There're always only, never more than, a few, and you have to poke around among the peanuts and almonds for them. Hazelnuts, filberts — I think they are the same. Whose idea is this anyway, to have this saloon keep moving? It seems so 70s, so disco, and, look, there's a disco ball there over the dance floor, and it is moving too, or is it rotating the other way, against the way we are going? Or the mirrored ball standing still goes backward as we go forward, not fast enough to throw its sparks. It's as if the lights are being plucked off, square by square, plink, plank, plunk. Silent wind chime. I swear the DJ must be spinning old Platters' platters. “Twilight Time,“ “Only You,“ “The Great Pretender,“ “My Prayer.“ They have that sound. Mercury, Mercury Records, a red diamond. There was that plastic gizmo you popped into the big hole in the center of a 45 so the record could be played on the long-play spindle. It looked like legs running after legs. The waiter has mastered his sea legs, steps on to the scuffed dance floor after leaving this moving one moving but not moving at our feet. Bringing our drinks. Let's stay with vodka but change the juice, Cape Codders this time around. My urinary tract is fine, thank you very much. The museum down there is meant to look like Independence Hall, but I don't know, twenty times as big, another one of Ford's big ideas. And they have it stuffed with railroad steam engines and everything, steam everythings, and cars of all sorts, of course. And hanging from the ceiling, the Spirit of St. Louis slowly rotates, but not the real one — or it is real, but a real fake, the one used in the movie. In the shadows is Henry Ford's village. Cars are prohibited except for old Tin Lizzies and Model As. There are wagons and buggies and surreys and carriages. And the horse manure is real too. I've been there. Hazelnuts seem oily and European. I think they grow on bushes. They are the same as filberts, but I'm not sure. You want the last one? It's all dark all the time now. The lights are coming on, and all the cars below are invisible save those pools of light the invisible cars sweep along the street. The streetlights show up the grid of the old townships, big squares that aren't square but seem to merge to triangle angles way off north. The sunset's set. And maybe we'll get lucky with a moonrise tonight. We'll keep an eye out the next time around. There's downtown Detroit. I was there for the riots in '67. I was on a field trip to watch the Tigers, Willie Horton, in my Little League uniform. I remember the endless bus ride out of town. Our bus being passed by trucks of troops and trucks with trailers hauling tanks and APCs. The downtown's a ruin now. Of course, I felt safe going there because no one else was there. They have this train that runs fully automatic in a big broad circle. I was by myself on the train. I rode from stop to stop. The doors of the train slid open at each stop, and this voice came on, a prerecorded voice, announcing the stop. “Hotel Cadillac,“ it said. The old hulk of that hotel looks like a wedding cake frosted with pigeons, the walls smeared white, and then the frosting flies up, a sheet of birds in one big flapping field. The door tells you it's going to close and then it closes. The train slides on and on. Every stop is a new ruin. The train makes a big loop. You want to dance? That dance floor isn't moving. The dance floor isn't dancing. It's Motown all night. Every night is Motown in Motown. Michigan's shaped like a glove. The dark lake, Huron, I think, outlines the shore all the way to Mackinaw, an island with no cars. I wonder if this cherry dotting the eye of my drink was grown up there. You want yours? I like them. They make every drink they're in seem more like a drink. Maraschino cherries aren't grown in any nature I know. Manufactured fruit. It's a kick to pull them off the stem, that little pop behind the teeth. You forget that you're moving. And you forget, way down below the earth is moving too, twirling and sliding like a dance. You want to? The fall is falling. The sunset set. You can see just a hint of it in those clouds beyond, the light bending and bouncing over the horizon. Out there's the rest of Michigan, Michigan ready to rest. But maybe that is Indiana or Indiana is over there on the other side of where the horizon used to be, invisible. I like to observe from the observation decks of tall buildings, to go up as far as I can. Baltimore has a restaurant downtown that turns like this one, and, as it turns, you can see the bay, and close by is this old clock tower that looms into view every hour or so and then retreats. Bromo Seltzer advertised around the face of the clock, the hands so big and always moving, it seems, in time with you as you drift by, constantly moving yourself as if you mesh, one gear into another. And then you're back to the panoramic window of water and toy boats and the factory with the sugar sign. The elevators there are glass and slide down the side of the building. And off in the distance is a roundhouse or two owned by the B&O, and the roundhouses are round. That's why they call them roundhouses. And now they are museums too. Filberts or hazelnuts. Hazelnuts or filberts. I'm not sure I know the difference. The last one is yours if you want it. You can't even feel it, the constant turning, the torque, the twist of the restaurant moving. It is pleasant, this journey going nowhere. It's a wonder how they do it, the smoothness of the mechanism, the gears. You hardly notice at all. It is all relative, the motion, depends on your point of view. If we remembered high school calculus it would help. We could plot all the points of all this pointing. X. And Y. And Z. The stars are out. And even time, that fourth dimension, is out. The time it takes for things to change and the square of that, the time it takes time, the time time takes.

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The almonds look like arrowheads. Almonds seem to be as abundant as filberts. I like them smoked, but just what is artificial smoke? Imagine, the artificial smoke factory making artificial smoke. Its smokestacks belching the exhaust of artificial smoke or maybe even artificial artificial smoke, artificial smoke the waste product of the process. Still it's good, the taste of almonds. The tooth of almonds. I like their density, the dentistry. They look like teeth, incisors, incisive. And they have ridges like fingernails do. Aren't they a cure for cancer? No, that was apricot stones, peach pits, I think. Whose idea is this anyway, to have this saloon keep moving? Maybe it can't be stopped. They leave it on all night, constantly turning. Vacuuming the carpet would be a snap with the maintenance crew on the stuck-still dance floor letting the floor come to them to be cleaned. Hold still, this won't hurt at all. The janitor then would dance with the buffer, waltzing over and over the wood floor. He turns and turns over the parquet, revolving slowly, riding the gyro of the polisher, the circulation of shine. All the time, the outer rim keeps orbiting, the rings of Saturn, the custodian coiled up in the twisting coil of the electric cord. Checkmate, checkmate, it's the Checkmates now. “Put It in a Magazine.“ High-rise Records, an L.A. Motown Motown sound. I swear the DJ is seriously esoteric. The waiter is waiting on us. He is coming round the bend. You can take that and that and that, but we are still working on the nuts. The waiter waits with us. He is dangerously close to the joint in this joint. The fault line is slipping by. Let's go back in time this time around and order a White Russian. Enough with the fruit. Bring us the cream. Or, no, make mine black, a Black Russian, the coffee will wake me up. The museum building — here it comes again — is meant to look like Independence Hall but, I don't know, twenty times as big. A model bigger than the thing it models, and inside is every model of every model Ford ever built. The wax models and the models made of clay. Every Edsel too and even models of cars that were never built, just lists of their names. There in the dark is Henry Ford's village. The only light beams out from Edison's factory Henry had hauled in from New Jersey, the generator still generating. And he poached the shop from Dayton where the Wrights warped wings and attached them to the leftover parts of bicycles. And somewhere deeper in out there is the shed where Henry himself pieced together his first runabout. In the village only old Fords are allowed to putter around. And somewhere in there is the chair. Not the electric one, though that might be in the museum, a technology of the twentieth century. Did Edison invent that too? No, Lincoln's chair. The one that would fit him, in the box at Ford's Theater. No relation? I remember it velvet, all stained with blood. Ten after ten, the clocks all say, the moment when the shot rang out. Ten and two — that's the proper grip for the wheel Henry invented. Hand over hand steering, turning. I learned on a simulator in the basement of the high school, that scripted FORD on the hub, a button for the horn. There's the last almond, a raft on a sea of peanuts. Look, out in the dark another circle circling. They've lit up the test tracks. See the moving circles of light circle through the puddle of light, a roulette ball on the banked banks, black braking red black white. Endurance trials probably. In that tight little orbit are all the simulations they need to weather the weather. Let it rain and it rains. An endless stutter of bumps, a washboard scrubbing the rocker panels clean off. No moon as of yet, just the map of one spilled on the ground. There's Detroit reborn. I swear the buildings have grown since the last time we've looked, and all the windows winking on. Hard by there, there, is Greektown, where they are setting fire to cheese and those shanks of pressed meat rotate like we are doing now, tubes of flesh turning, twisting on an upright spit. Hey, I'm getting hungry. You want to dance? Cut a rug? Now there would be a collection for the museum in our wake, on our way. A gallery of cut rugs. The Lindy. The two-step. The fox-trot. The box step. The waltz. Yes, the shag. The shag rug. The dance floor doesn't move. And no one dances. We could lay some carpet. No, tile it in checkerboard squares. Your move. I liked the night. The knight. Up one, over two. Cha cha cha. Over one, down two. Cha cha cha. It's Motown all night. Every night is Motown in Motown. The Checkmates aren't Motown but they should be. Spilling off thataway, that big blank space outlined by lights would be the desert of Lake Erie looking eerie, black on black. I eat the ice. I eat it after I suck all the white out of it, all the black. No fruit with the Russians, but these cubes melt to a kind of fruit, a grape-shaped nougat, don't they? I know it's impolite to spit them back and let them bathe up another coating. The ice another product of Michigan. All that water, turning too to ice, to steam. You forget you're moving. Ontario is over there, and that's the best bar bet there is. Driving due south from Detroit, what is the first foreign country you run into? Folks'll say Mexico, the Yucatan, Cancun, or worse. Colombia. Panama. They are thinking south, mind you. When it was right there all the time. Canada creeping under the chinny chin chin of Michigan. Due south. In New Orleans the ground floor of the Hotel Monteleone has a carousel bar. The room doesn't spin like this one here, the bar a fixed center. There you ride the ring of the bar itself, stools and all canopied with old-fashioned circus gothic awnings, lots of brass poles. I remember calliope music as you ride it round and round, cantering past the big front window facing Royal Street and the circulating revelers of the Quarter short-circuited from Bourbon. Here we are above the water and there you are down below it. The pool is on the roof, and swampy and soaked and floating your turn on the rubber raft, you look out at the vast waterlogged delta on all sides and feel, in your steeped state, you are sinking into, going down this particular drain. Almondine, the slices shaved from almonds look like fish scales. The scales scale the fish. You know, if we went faster we would be thrown through the windows off into space. I feel like I am floating now — an object tends to stay in motion. Just keeps going. But space is curved and this merry-go-round keeps us rounded off, rounding us off. Centrifugal. Gesundheit. Our faces all distorted, all plastic, pulling Gs. Gee, I want to stick my hand out the window moving fast and feel all that is invisible push back.