Joanna Ruocco: Dan

“But I am an employee,” broke in Melba. “Leslie Duck is my boss. What else could I be?”

“I’m going to run these prints and we’ll see,” said Officer Greg. “You could be a lot of things. A wife, a mother, a safe-breaker, a patient …”

“I’m not!” protested Melba.

“Well maybe you’re a victim, then …” continued Officer Greg and Melba gasped.

“A victim! Like Grady Help?”

Officer Greg’s fine eyelid quivered. “Who told you Grady Help was a victim?”

Melba swallowed.

“Everyone knows it,” she said. “It was a pillow fight, wasn’t it? He was suffocated during a pillow fight at Dan Elementary during the annual slumber party. I almost think I was there, or nearby anyway, asleep in the bleachers.”

“Grady Help is not a victim, Melba,” said Officer Greg.

“What is he then?” asked Melba eagerly. She leaned forward, letting her eyes drop down the ledge of Officer Greg’s brow and skim over the sophisticated slope of his nose again and again, deriving a breathless pleasure from it. She hadn’t expected confidences from Officer Greg!

“He’s a renter, Melba,” said Officer Greg and Melba jerked her hands apart and slammed one fist on the counter.

“Why yes!” she cried. “He is!” Just a few days before, Melba had run into her mother while wandering the weedy verges of the public golf course and her mother had taken the opportunity to denounce Grady Help in exactly those terms.

“Men like Grady Help are old enough to be fathers, but what are they?” Gigi Zuzzo had said. “Renters! They get together and play tabletop games. All their money goes to tables. What’s the difference between a table and a house?”

Melba had not answered her mother. She had often thought that a table was in fact like a house, but a more wonderful house, a miniature house created especially for just one person. How she dreamed of sitting beneath a table, curling up in the gently dipping curve of a trestle foot, sucking a pistachio, the floor-length vinyl tablecloth closing her in on all sides.

Gigi Zuzzo waited, tapping her fingernails on her front teeth. Finally she could wait no more.

“I’ll tell you,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “Property taxes! A man who owns a table doesn’t have to pay property taxes. If everyone owned a table instead of a house, we wouldn’t have roads. We wouldn’t have schools either. Who do you think drove away your precious Principal Benjamin?” Gigi Zuzzo spat a golf tee she had been holding in her mouth like a toothpick and went on with clearer speech. “Men like Grady Help, that’s who. Your father Zeno Zuzzo is almost a man like Grady Help,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “Do you know what the difference is between your father and Grady Help?”

Melba shook her head cautiously.

“Me!” cried Gigi Zuzzo. “I turned your father into your father, but otherwise he was Grady Help. Whenever I kicked him out of the house he reverted back into his Grady Help-like state, but worse, because he didn’t rent anything. He moved into Pike’s Ditch and slept under the footbridge.”

Melba nodded, less cautiously. She remembered when her father moved into Pike’s Ditch, an increscent gouge rumored to be a natural formation that divided the Dan junkyard from the retirement home. Gigi Zuzzo seemed much happier with Zeno Zuzzo living there. As soon as he left, she’d moved Melampus into the master bedroom and given up sleep. Giving up sleep, claimed Gigi Zuzzo, had an energizing effect and built muscle mass. She had given up sitting as well, and whenever Melba came through the door after an outing Gigi Zuzzo was standing behind it, already speaking. Melba went on many outings in those days. She would visit her father in Pike’s Ditch and together they passed the glad hours. Zeno Zuzzo showed Melba how he occupied himself throwing knives into a pile of tires and also imitated birdcalls. Melba was impressed by the birdcalls and once she had made the mistake of demonstrating to her mother the different trills and chirps. Gigi Zuzzo’s face had darkened as Melba fluted out the lovely little sounds.

“I don’t suppose your father was too busy chirping to tell you about Shane Joseph?” Gigi Zuzzo asked.

“Shane Joseph,” Melba murmured. She remembered a man who had come as a speaker to Dan Elementary. He had long hair and wore an ace bandage on his wrist. He had told a story:

Once upon a time, he — Shane Joseph — was struck by lightning while playing guitar on his porch in a droning, staticky drizzle. The guitar was incinerated, and he had not replaced it. He had not even mourned it. The lightning strike had destroyed, for him, not only that particular guitar, but all guitars. The very idea of guitar had been erased from his consciousness. He knew the word “guitar” but the word corresponded to nothing, to a void that then filled with the sounds guitars had masked. Without guitar, Shane Joseph was able to listen at last to the music of the moss, the moss that seemed so much a part of Dan, always at hand, always underfoot, mantling stones and bricks, shingles and boards, tree trunks and porch furniture, that no one suspected its alien origins; no one, with the exception of Shane Joseph, heard it sing of its journeys, of its spores that had traveled light years through interstellar space; no one heard it sing of the world’s end, of the sub-aquatic cities the survivors would build beneath the risen seas and of the glorious governance of those cities; no one, with the exception of Shane Joseph, and whatever young people might someday be taught to join him in the erasure of guitar from their consciousnesses, opening in its place the void that would be filled with songs of creation and destruction, the songs of the moss, thank you — and as Shane Joseph finished speaking, Principal Benjamin stood and dimmed the lights. In the ensuing silence, he switched on the overhead projector, showing architectural drawings of a black granite pyramid in the place of the school music trailer. Shortly thereafter, the school music trailer was demolished, but the construction of the pyramid was never completed, and rather than functioning as a power station, it seemed, in its half-finished state, the closest thing to a tomb Principal Benjamin had been accorded. Melba sighed. The memory of Shane Joseph brought her pain. Shane Joseph.

“He wears an ace bandage?” she said.

“Not that Shane Joseph!” Gigi Zuzzo snorted. “This Shane Joseph was a vagrant. Vagrants move about on foot, but they also need their arms. Vagrants climb water towers and they scale other things too. Cabooses. Well, Shane Joseph learned the hard way about birds.”

Melba listened with interest. She had a great fondness for birds. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, she would run up the hill behind the house and play dead upon a rocky eminence, hoping to lure a hungry raptor from the air. After a few hours, supine, staring at the pointillated blue and white of the sky, she would experience restless motion in her limbs and roaring in her ears, and hurry home for freezer pastries and milk. But she would always return to the eminence, dreaming of the young hawk that would descend from the sky to stick its beak into her viscera. She would start up, catching it unawares, and tame it, teaching it to ride upon her forearm, and, in leather gauntlet, she would journey through life providing a perch for a compact, responsive friend whose physical and emotional maintenance would become her great calling. Gigi Zuzzo, however, pronounced the word “bird” so as to emphasize its tinny, brittle quality, alerting Melba to its irreconcilability with the word “friend,” which she knew had a warm center, like runny caramel in a chocolate square.

“Shane Joseph’s vagrancy brought him to Pike’s ditch,” said Gigi Zuzzo, “but he was only passing through. He didn’t intend to stay there. He was a true vagrant, not the type that’s always looking for some excuse to settle down. But your father invited him to spend the night beneath the footbridge, and Shane Joseph agreed. The next thing … Kablooey!”