Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

I never liked that porch. When we first moved in I tried to have morning glories, but the light back there’s no good. Not to mention the pigeons—generations homing from before Verman probably, their crap crusted like concrete. I hate that smell of shit and feathers when it rains. Horny bull pigeons pacing the sills, puffed up, making that nonstop spooky ooh-ooh like a backyard of ghosts. I asked, Frank, ain’t there some way to get ridda them?

He bought a sumnabitching pack a M-80s, and blew off a couple, which scared the flock across the alley to Pani Bozak’s, where they could shit up her yard, not like it mattered cause she kept illegal chickens, and a one-legged rooster that woke up the neighborhood. Next day the pigeons are back on our side.

I go, Frank, how about a BB gun or rat poison?

What you need’s an owl, Frank says. Pigeons are terrified of owls. That’s what they do to scare them off the skyscrapers downtown—set a plastic owl out like a scarecrow and it keeps them away for good.

You’re talking a bird a prey, not the cigar, right, Frank?

Real funny, Rosie, he says.

But the sumnabitch never bothered bringing home an owl, so I avoided the porch. It was Frank’s new office for “doing the books,” an activity that looked a lot like reading Wild West paperbacks, listening to the ball game, drinking beer, taking naps, and scribbling in the spiral notebook he kept in his back pocket. When we were young, he wrote his poems and his predictions about the races in those notebooks. I hadn’t seen him writing in them since we stopped going to Sportsman’s.

I asked him, What you always scribbling lately?

Just words, he says.

What kinda words?

Words I see going by on trains.

Like what? Get Fucked, Blow Me ?

Yeah, Rosie, like Get Fucked.

One Saturday I hear the opera station mixed up with the creepy pigeons. Usually Frank played it quiet cause opera annoys me. But it’s blaring. I walk to the porch and he’s standing by the windows looking out, waving his arms like he’s Pavarotti. Jumped like I’d caught him in the act. I look out the window to see what he’s singing at. Across the alley, where there used to be Pani Bozak’s chickens pecking at a dirt yard, there’s the Widow’s laundry hanging on a pulley clothesline from her back window. What sun shines back there’s shining through her flimsy black panties. It’s like Frederick’s of Hollywood: lacy slips, camisoles, D-cup bras, nylons—not pantyhose—silk nylons like she was wearing when she sashayed into the Deuces, like women used to wear with garter belts. You see underclothes like that and know why they’re called unmentionables. Everything’s black but her bedsheets, silk sheets that must of cost a fortune. With every breeze, her panties wave on the line like pennants over a used car lot.

I go, Enjoying the view?

I was just wondering the color of those sheets, Frank says, all innocent.

Sumnabitch is right—in the sun those sheets ain’t white or silver, pink or peach. They’re pearly. I never laid eyes on such beautiful sheets. Obviously she wants the world to see what she lays her rich ass down on. I go, If she’s so goddamn rich, why don’t she let the Chinese do her laundry?

Probably wants it smelling fresh, Frank says.

That yard smells like chickens and cat piss, I say. And how come she still got the back door boarded up? That place still looks condemned. So much for property values.

Frank just shrugs. Then the sumnabitch asks, Ever wonder what it must feel like to sleep on sheets like that?

Words can be a slap in the face, but that was a sucker punch. Knocked the breath out of me. I suddenly knew, plain as the nose on a face, something was going on. That the weaselly sumnabitch was in so deep he couldn’t hide it. He hadda play the opera loud, hadda be writing poems again in those notebooks, hadda be sneaking out at night, hadda ask, You ever think what sleeping on those sheets is like, cause that’s all he can think about. Maybe it’s his way a telling me he already has.

Maybe the sumnabitch thinks after over a year I still ain’t awake. Well, that woke me up. I don’t say nothing. But my mind’s racing about how when I’m laying sick upstairs, he’d taken to going out at night after closing the bar, like walking the dog, except we ain’t got a dog.

Frank, where you going? I’d ask.

Just for a walk to clear my head, Rosie. I don’t get enough exercise. You go back to sleep.

You taking a shower before going for a walk?

I stink from the bar, he says. That cigar smoke gives me migraines. You know they’re finding smoke’s a BOH.

B O Wha?

Bartender occupational hazard. Like black lung for miners.

When he’d come back, God knows what time, I’d smell cigarettes on him and figured the sumnabitch was going out cause he was smoking again on the sly.

It’s late, Frank. Where’d you walk to?

Over to the yards to see the trains rumble by. You know I like watching the trains. I miss their smell. Tonight I saw a boxcar go by with RAGE on it, and the next car said RAGE, too, and the next car said AGAINST, and the next THE DYING … then OF THE … and the last car said LIGHT.

People sure write some weird shit on trains.

If you just read stuff on one car, yeah, but put all the cars together and there’s patterns, like messages. The sound of trains keeps some people up. Me, it cures insomnia.

Since when you got insomnia?

Insomnia’s a BOH—having a screwed-up clock. Midnight for normal people’s noon to bartenders. Go back to sleep, Rosie. Be glad you can.

Go to sleep , Rosie . Oh, yeah. I don’t say nothing, cause trying to talk would be like choking. And what if I’m wrong? It’s just possible the sumnabitch is so goddamn oblivious it never occurred to him not to ask the woman he’s married to whether she ever wondered what it would be like sleeping on some slut’s sheets.

Oblivious or not, the sumnabitch don’t know I’m on to him, and that means it’s me holding the four deuces, a hand he don’t see coming from that single deuce showing on the table. I got the luxury of waiting to pounce, watching him dig hisself deeper. It calms me down when I realize it. Gives me patience.

That slut’s laundry hangs for days. Who lets their laundry hang through the middle of the night? When Frank ain’t tending bar, he’s on the back porch communing with it. I start noticing changes on the clothesline—a different pair of panties, a half-slip that wasn’t there before. Maybe it’s like a message that szmata ’s sending, reminding him a the clothes he stripped off her stitch by stitch on the sheets they rolled around on and left stained and sweaty.

But then I think, What if I’m wrong?

One year all I done is sleep and now I’m up all hours watching to catch her at her window, reeling in the unmentionables, reeling out new ones. At night, I haul the garbage out and stand looking over the fence into her back windows. The plywood’s off, but she got those Old Country lace curtains that look transparent, but there’s no seeing in. I can make out candles burning, and I remember how me and Frank would light candles when we got romantic. He had an old record player and would play the Stones cause he knew it got me in the mood, and later when he thought I was asleep, he’d smoke a cigarette and play his opera at a whisper.

See, ever since we lost the baby, me and Frank weren’t really living as husband and wife. Maybe something changed even before, when I got pregnant. I don’t know exactly when it started. Things happen in slivers too tiny to notice until they suddenly add up and you’re amazed you been living in their shadow. That night we won the Deuces changed us. One minute Frank that sumnabitch was crying like a baby in the dark, and the next he’s asking me to tell my dirtiest secret. And when I did, I told him, Frank, you gotta really want to do it. Well, he got into it, all right. I think he kept waiting for me to draw the boundary, you know? I think the sumnabitch was wondering if there was a boundary in his little Rosebud. Best sex of my life. But we had a keep upping the ante. For him it was how outrageous could we get. Me, I was listening for that voice that whispered dirty to me at the track, only I never heard it that clear again even when I’d whisper it to myself.