Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

I took off my pajamas and grabbed my underpants. “Aren’t you going to shower first?” Ford said, and I said “Why? Do I smell so bad that you don’t think I can wait till I get home tonight?”

“It’s not that. We’re all meeting you at your studio later where Grandpa’s coming to treat us to dinner and a show.”

“Has that been agreed to by your mother?”

Jan said “On your birthday, Saul, you know your father always takes charge.”

“Agreed, then,” and I got in the shower. My family undressed and got in with me, and though it was crowded and we each did our share of horsing around under the spray, we did manage to get our bodies soaped, and Frilly even got in a shampoo.

We sat at the kitchen table for breakfast. Frilly lit candles, and when I said “At breakfast?” she said “It’s a special occasion, did you forget?” and handed me a box wrapped with the front page of today’s newspaper and decorated with quartermoons and tentacled suns and stars. Inside were two nylon brushes, a number 14 and 17, which I needed badly. I hadn’t sold a painting in months and I was again starting to put the touch on my closest friends. Ford gave me a pound tube of Mars black and Jan presented me with twenty-five yards of the best unprimed duck canvas. “You’re all saints,” I said, “and I worship you as others might worship the great god Moolah, but now I gotta get going and live up to your faith in me.”

They walked me outside. I unchained my motor scooter from the building’s fence, hugged my family and headed for my studio, which was in a municipal-run building of artists’ lofts in the poorest section of town.

Once there, I promptly began the completion of a huge painting I was calling The Birth of the Earth,” and was working feverishly, laying on heavy long strokes of the Mars black with my new 17 brush, when one of the other artists in the building knocked on my door and said I was wanted on the pay phone downstairs.

It was Jan, saying don’t worry, everything will be all right, I should prepare myself for some pretty rough though not totally catastrophic news — while I was practically screaming for her to come out with it already — but a boy had entered my father’s junior high school classroom without a late pass and when my father told him to go to the guidance office to get one, the boy shot him in the hip. “But Dad’s okay,” she said. “He’s going to live; be thankful for that,” but my knees wobbled and I fell back against the wall and slid down to the floor. She said, when I told her where I was sitting, to stop acting like a wimp and meet her at the hospital right away.

I went outside and signaled for a cab. One stopped, and I ran to it, but a man beat me to the door. I told him that not only had I hailed the cab first but that it was possibly a dying father I was going to see, and he took out a handgun from a concealed shoulder holster. I feinted left, sprinted right, but the man shot me in the leg and, after I bounced off a car fender to the street, he stared straight down at my face and cursed me before putting a bullet into my head.

“Saul, Saul, what are you still lying there for? You have to get up,” my wife said, leaning over me and looking distressed. Had I really survived? I thought. Was I in a hospital or still on the street? “And what about Dad?” I said.

“What about him? Because if you aren’t out of bed and dressed in half an hour, we’ll miss the 11:15 to Morganburg Lake, and the next train doesn’t leave till three.”

I got up, began dressing, told Jan about these scary repetitive dreams I had overnight, and she said the rich food she made for dinner last night must have affected me. “My stomach didn’t feel too good either when I woke up.” I asked if the kids were all right and she said “Sure, why shouldn’t they be?” I didn’t want to alarm her with the very real fear the dreams had left in me, so I said “Because of the food. How are they feeling?”

Those two? They’ve stomachs like a shark’s. That’s because theirs haven’t been tampered with years of cocktails and cognacs.”

We all sat down for breakfast. Frilly already had her swimsuit on under her sundress, and Ford, while eating, was stuffing his school-bag with books, sports equipment, and little action figures. Then we cabbed to the station and boarded the train.

I was looking out the train window at the fields and farms we passed and feeling a lot more peaceful than I had this morning, when a woman shrieked at the front of the car. Another woman screamed, a man yelled “Turn the damn thing up,” a radio was made louder and a newscaster, trying to hold back his sobs, said There’s no uncertainty about it now: Senator Booker Maulson, without question the nation’s leading spokesman for the underprivileged and poor and its most ardent activist for world peace, was shot in the back of the head while making an Independence Day speech to a picnicking crowd of thousands.”

“God help us,” Jan said, and started crying. Frilly broke down also, and Ford pulled my arm and asked why everyone was so excited.

I went to the front of the car where most of the passengers had gathered around the radio. The newscaster said Maulson was killed instantly and his murderer beaten to death before police could pry him away from the outraged mob. Many of the people in the car were now weeping uncontrollably. The woman beside me said she was sure Maulson’s murder was part of a worldwide conspiracy: “People just don’t want peace, that’s all.” Two men who seemed to be traveling together told her Maulson had got what he’d been asking for, with all his peace marches and speeches against big business and the military and war. The man holding the radio said these men were talking cruelly and stupidly, and out of respect for Senator Maulson, his grieving family and the millions of people around the world who will mourn his death, they should shut their mouths. The men said they didn’t have to, this was still a democratic country where freedom of speech was accepted as nearly a sacrament, and this man was an ignorant liberal patsy who maybe ought to be shot in the head himself. The man handed the radio to his son and jumped at the two men. He knocked one of them to the floor and kicked him in the face and was beating up the other one with his fists when the man on the floor shot him in the back.

I pulled the emergency cord. The train stopped and I led my family to the rear of the car, where I forced open the door and we jumped out. We’d follow the tracks to the last station we passed, about six miles away, and from there take a train back to the city. Then, Jan and I would decide on doing one or two things: buying a used car and finding a quiet, remote part of the country to live and work in, or using all our savings to fly across the ocean and settle in a much safer and saner land.

We’d walked a few miles when Jan said we should stop: she and the kids were exhausted. We rested on a shady hill near the tracks. I felt tired and tried to fight off sleep because of the dreams I might have, but I soon dozed off. Someone was shooting BB holes through the windows of our new house. “Come on out or we’re going to come in and drag you out,” a boy yelled through a bullhorn.

The telephone rang. The woman who answered my hello said They’ve just killed your son at school, and because he’s the son of yours, we’re all glad.”

Our neighbor, Mrs. Fleishman, yelled from her window across the narrow airshaft. “Two army men smashed down our door and shot Mr. Fleishman and then threw him down the stairwell. Help me, call the police.”

I called the police. The officer said Mr. Fleishman deserved to be killed and so did I. “Without doubt, Mr. Greene, your family’s next. None of you people can think you’re safe anymore,” and when I asked for his badge number, he said “Shove It Up, Nine One One.”