Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

Mrs. Fleishman screamed for me again from her window. They’re coming to get me now, Mr. Greene. Hurry, call the police.”

My wife came into the bedroom. Three state troopers are at the door. Should I let them in?”

“Of course, let them in. What did we do that we have to be afraid of?” Right after she left the room, I shouted “No, no, Jan, I was wrong.”

Frilly was being dragged out of the apartment when I ran into the living room. I started after her down the stairs, heard a gun discharge, and covered my eyes. Jan demanded I go to the window to see what had happened. Frilly had been shot by a firing squad as she stood against our building’s courtyard wall.

“Six soldiers and Marines are at the door,” Jan said. They say if I don’t let them in they’ll shoot the doorknob off.”

“Where’s my gun,” I said, “where’s that damn gun?” Jan said I didn’t have a gun. “You’ve always been firmly against even holding a gun. You don’t even know how to load or shoot a gun,” and I said “I’ve got one, all right,” and searched frantically through our dresser and pulled out Ford’s cap pistol and aimed it at the front door and pressed the trigger, and real bullets came out, I had firing power in my hand, I kept shooting at the men Jan had said were behind the door and yelling “You’re all dead, you bastards; I’m getting back at every last one of you; you’re all getting exactly what you deserve,” and the door crashed to the floor, the men fell in after it, about ten of them, half of them dressed like soldiers and state troopers and police, and all dead, I had killed them all.

They’re dragging Frilly away again,” Jan said.

“Ford, where’s Ford?”

They’re dragging Ford away also. Stop them, Saul. Do something before I go crazy right here.”

They’re killing my dog,” Mrs. Fleishman screamed. “Help me, Mr. Greene. They’re murdering my dear Dovetail with bullets.”

“Dad,” Frilly said, “you’re sweating something awful. Mom’s awake and says we should get a move on.”

Police cars and ambulances with their sirens going were speeding on the country road paralleling the tracks, no doubt heading to the train we’d been on. I asked Jan how she was and she said “Still sad and frightened but not so tired anymore. I slept also and also had bad dreams.”

I told her I’d carry her to the station on my shoulders if she wasn’t so tall and big-boned, and she laughed, said she could make it on her own, that maybe we should have stayed to help that poor wounded man and his son, that she supposed we shouldn’t feel too guilty, as there must be several other people on the train, including a doctor and nurse or two, who could do a much better job than us. Then the four of us resumed our walk to the station, calmer now, on probably the worst day of our lives.

He dials the California number Chloe sent him last week when she wrote that she and Lucia had finally found an interim home. She also said they’d be driving east for a vacation in a few weeks and was Pennsylvania before or after New York? He hasn’t seen them in three years. He wrote about that last afternoon with them in a story that opens with Chloe saying she’s pregnant by him, though she was living with her husband at the time, and closes around two years later with Chloe and Lucia driving onto the San Francisco freeway on their way back to L.A., though in real life the cities were reversed, as he wanted the story to end with the letter A because it began with the woman’s name Zee. Nobody noticed the alphabetic artifice or the twenty-four others he planted in the story, as they haven’t in the story where all the men have names that could be women’s, like Robin and Dale. Or in another where all the city names start off with Saint, San or Santa and the women are named after ores, alloys, metals, gems and semiprecious stones.

“Chloe’s on the property but a half mile through the woods from here,” a man says. This long distance? Give me your number and we’ll have her call you back on our magic free telephone.”

Last commune she lived in was vegetarian, Chloe wrote, and so authoritarian that when they found her and five-year-old Lucia sharing a beef jerky, they forced Chloe to eat six bowls of cold porridge made from organically grown hand-ground oats, and Lucia three. Lucia became so hysterical after the third bowl that she had to be injected with a tranquilizer, and they were evicted the next day. Always mistakes, she wrote in another letter, all but the last he’s included in an epistolary story composed solely of edited versions of the letters she’s written him the past few years, with all the people’s names switched around and the same dates and locations other than for the exact building, RTD and box numbers reproduced.

This year she fell in love with a junkie, she said in the letter and story, and the year before that with an alcoholic, and she hoped both would say “Ah, at last a woman who turns me on, someone to communicate with, to be with; now I can throw away my junk, my gin, my jive, forget my literary critiques and satirical cartoons and great American hovels and go off with her and start a farm and finally do something worthwhile.” One man she recently met at a psychodrama, the incident he closed the story with. “Everyone was putting him down. So I said to him ‘What you want and need most is to mount a woman and really jam it all the way in there, am I right?’ Everyone hooted at me to sit down, but the man said ‘Lady, you just knocked the nail on the nose. But no chick will let me do it because they think I’m too horny or homely or both.’ ‘Well, let’s first end this pressing need you have, and after that we can get down to the weightier issue of why you think you’re homely or have to be horny, but not in front of these unfeeling creeps.’ The rest of the psychodrama participants began beating up on me when I refused to be mounted in front of them, and when the man tried tearing them off me, they broke a few of his teeth. They only let us go after they’d ripped, bit, scratched and clawed most of our clothes off and some of our hair and skin, and later in my place we went to bed. He turned out to be leery, weirdy, a bad lover, a born loser, I think syphilitic and infanticidal, maybe even sapropelic and homosexual, certainly sadistic, sodomitic, satanic, septic, scabietic, scrofulous, carious, dystonic, dyspeptic, dysuric, the worst. Mistakes. Always mistakes.”

She calls an hour later. “Piers?”

“Hey, Chloe, how are you?”

“Fine, thanks, how are you?”

“And Lucia?”

“Fine? Family’s doing fine? You know I’m untalkative on the phone. What do you want?”

“Um, glum…to hear you say you’re untalkative on the phone?”

“Very untalkative on the phone.”

“Lots of untalkatives on the phone.”

“Can’t we stop with the untalkatives on the phone?”

“To find out if you’re still writing your journals?”

“Daily. I was in fact logging today’s account when they said you wanted me to call back, which I also wrote down. And now, as I’m talking to you, I’m trying with my other hand to transcribe everything you said before, as this is an unusual event. So far I’ve the journal question, your untalkatives on the phone, ‘Um, bum,’ and ‘And Lucia?’ and ‘Hey, Chloe, how are you?’ Verbal equivocals and punning abound in your talk, Piers. Despite everything I’ve done and might do in my life, do you think I’ll post-Chloe be known wholly as Lucia’s madonna and your occasional chronicler and letter recipient and one-time mistress as Ka'a’s Milena now is? But we’re starving and haven’t any food and neither does the main house, so we have to drive down the mountain to the supermarket. Lucia wants to speak to you too.”