Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

I walk back into the alley and stand knee-deep in Pani Bozak’s drifted little yard, beside those sheets, breathing in the outer-space sky. The sheets are mother-of-pearl in the moonlight and I can see my shadow on them. I don’t feel dizzy anymore. I haven’t taken off my fox fur since it got so cold, and I feel alert like an animal, one with steamy breath that comes out at night to hunt when everyone’s sleeping. An animal with night senses. Everything’s clear, the snow satiny like the sheets. I can hear each falling flake fitting into place as it touches down on the surface of all the flakes that fell before. Whoever invented lace curtains must have spent a lot of nights watching snow. Ever wonder what it must feel like to sleep on sheets like that? I can see the candle flames nodding yes and no. I lift each sheet up from the bottom, like I’m holding the train of a bridal gown, and pour slow, so the kerosene soaks in. When I used to worry about a house fire, Frank that sumnabitch would tell me you could touch a match to a teaspoon of kerosene and it wouldn’t ignite. Well, that’s not the case if you touch it with a lit railroad flare. Flames lap from a stinking cloud of smudge, the sheets flame up, and there’s a screech from under the eaves.

The owl opens its wings and dives like how it must swoop down on pigeons—so sudden I topple backward like in slow motion, dropping the fuel can and swiping with the flare to fend it off from raking out my eyes, and as it veers off, I stare into its ghost face, into its huge gold no-mercy pupils. I lay there in the snow, looking up. The owl, screeching like it has a stammer, circles twice above the burning laundry, then flaps away over the white roofs.

That’s a very flattering likeness of me, Rafael.

You not only got the boobs right, but the nipples. I see when I told you, use your imagination, you took me at my word, or can angels see through a woman’s clothes? Don’t think I’m so vain to miss that you took off a few years, and more than a few pounds. Made me voluptuous again if only for an afternoon.

You got a God-given gift, like maybe I had once. You know someone’s got a gift if they wanna give it. What good’s a gift if not to give? Bet if Sinatra hadn’t been discovered, he’d a kept singing for nothing. Not everyone gets rich as him or Jagger. I mean there’s painters at carnivals who for five bucks in five minutes can do a portrait that makes you look like your inner movie star. I knew right off you weren’t no housepainter, Rafael. And no mural painter, either, at least not the murals around here, the spray-paint Virgins even the gangbangers don’t dare deface. I got a feeling the kinda Virgin you’d paint would be the kind that Frank that sumnabitch woulda liked slapped up on the Deuces—an apparition in red heels two stories tall and naked, in a fur coat open to the world, a giant bottle of Chopin vodka ascending beside her. That woulda got our tavern some free publicity all right, until they burned it to the ground.

That picture deserves one more on the house. Chopin versus Señor Cuervo, round three. Tak . Thank you, Rafael. Na zdrowie!

The Widow? She don’t live there, no one does. It’s boarded up, front and rear. Condemned. I heard she moved to Miami, but who knows.

Frank that sumnabitch?

Weeks after he left—day before New Year’s Eve—I get a call from the police in Libby, Montana. A freight train got derailed by a avalanche. Knocked eighteen boxcars off the track and buried them under rock and ice, and when they finally dug out the train, they found Frank in a mangled boxcar. He was frozen stiff so they don’t think the crash killed him. They think he got locked in, that he coulda been in there for weeks, maybe since the night he disappeared, just before the weather turned bitter and snow blew in. Maybe he was drunk and climbed in the boxcar to get outta the cold and lay there smelling that train smell he loved, and when he woke up, the boxcar was sealed, and nobody could hear him screaming help in his hoarse voice. Maybe hobos knocked him over the head. I asked the cop, What was that boxcar carrying?

How’s that, ma’am? he asks.

You know, what was in there—guns, fur coats, cases of liquor?

Can’t answer that, ma’am, the cop says. Mind if I ask why it matters?

Could he have been stealing and got locked in? I ask.

The cop goes, No need to worry, ma’am. He says the only stealing far as they’re concerned was done to my husband—his watch gone, wedding ring, his jacket. Somebody’d picked him clean and the only way they ID’d him was his wallet hid in his cowboy boots. Those boots probably didn’t look like they’d fit whoever robbed his body.

I ask what it said on the side of the boxcar they found Frank in, and the cop says he don’t rightly know anything about that neither and he’s really sorry he can’t give me more information, cause he knows from his own times of loss how the little details about a loved one’s last hours take on sacred meaning.

I go, Yeah, well, the reason I wanted to know was that whatever that boxcar said, they could put on his tombstone. And the cop says, You telling me you don’t want us shipping the body back to you, ma’am? And I go, Hey, he always wanted to be a cowboy, so why don’t you do the sumnabitch a last favor and bury him out there on the lone prairie?

For his epitaph, I went with Cool Bunny by a Nose .

Tak. Salute! I warned you, tequila gets me rowdy. Tell you what, Rafael, I got a gift for you. Do me a favor and close the door. We don’t want someone getting the wrong idea if they walk in. And play “Wild Horses” on the jukebox—A7.

You can feel them for luck, Rafael. Buena suerte . Hot nips, just like you drew them. Let’s see that racing form. I’m gonna close my eyes and run my finger along the races, and where I point, you play that horse. I don’t care if it’s a loser at fifty to one. You put everything you got on it, tonight.

The phone is ringing in the crummy downstairs flat where Rafael lives, ringing and ringing, but Rafael isn’t home. It rang this morning at five and on and off all day through the hot afternoon. Now it’s after midnight, still sweltering as if the satin nickel moon is throwing heat, and this time the ringing doesn’t sound as if it’s going to stop. Someone really wants to talk to Rafael, someone who obviously hasn’t heard he’s disappeared.

That’s the word on the street: Rafael’s gone—as thoroughly as people disappeared in Argentina, removed as efficiently as if he’s been ethnically cleansed, or maybe one of the death squads from Central America went out of their way one night to stop by the southwest side of Chicago and pay Rafael a visit.

He’s joined the disappeared, but in the barrio incongruously called Pilsen, a hood famed for its graffiti art, there won’t be mothers with the mournful Madonna look, bringing down the government by holding blowups of Rafael’s picture—the self-portrait with respirator and nighthawk wings—pasted to placards that read MISSING. At St. Paul’s on Hoyne Avenue, or St. Procopius on Alport, or St. Ann’s on Leavitt, where Rafael was baptized, there won’t be radical padres risking martyrdom by protesting from their pulpits that Rafael must not be forgotten.

A stooped, veiled figure lights a candle for a soul. It’s Sister Two Teresas, who chose her name in honor of both the Little Flower of Lisieux and Saint Teresa of Ávila. Her life has been lived by the words of Saint Teresa of Ávila: Accustom yourself continually to make many acts of love, for they enkindle and melt the soul. She once oversaw the altar boys when St. Ann’s still had a grade school and now, in her dotage, arranges the altar flowers. She can’t remember yesterday, and yet recalls how twenty-three years ago Lance Corporal Milo Porter, the most devout boy she’d ever coached, stood in his dress blues as if they were a surplice, cradling the son he’d named after an angel, while Father Stanislaus dribbled the water of eternal life over the wailing infant’s head. And she remembers how two years later when Lance Corporal Porter, missing in action, couldn’t attend his own requiem mass, she wept and prayed: Oh, how everything that is suffered with love is healed again.