Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

“Do you like stories?” his uncle had asked him during their first visit.

“Sure,” Rob said.

“Good. Stories are what kept me sane,” Uncle Wayne said, then laughed in the odd, stifled way of his as if at a private joke between them.

But reading aloud, his uncle lost his shyness. Uncle Wayne didn’t simply read stories, he lived them. During “The Most Dangerous Game,” Rob had to run from room to room while his uncle, reading aloud the entire time, stalked him, the storybook in one hand, and in the other a bow made from a clothes hanger strung with a rubber band and armed with an arrow fashioned from a cardboard pant guard.

When they read “The Monkey’s Paw,” Rob hid behind his bedroom door while his uncle mounted the stairs with the heavy-footed, ominous tread of someone dead who’d been summoned back from the grave. Nearly quaking with fear, Rob had tried to wish him back into his grave while his uncle Wayne pounded on the door.

His uncle would open the book by Edgar Allan Poe and turn to his favorite story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and the boy would force himself to watch his uncle’s face so as not to miss the instantaneous transformation when his uncle’s eyes assumed a maniacal gleam and his mouth twisted into a malevolent smile as he read the opening words: “True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” And then he’d burst into a spit-flecked spasm of psychopathic laughter.

But of all the stories they read together, it was “Leiningen Versus the Ants” that was the most frightening and memorable. How many Sunday afternoons, while other boys watched double-headers or shot baskets at a hoop suspended above a carport, had Rob sat sweating and listening intently as Uncle Wayne read about Leiningen making his way through the jungle, evading the hordes of army ants?

The ants streamed past barriers of water and fire, relentlessly consuming everything in their path with their black grinding mandibles, mandibles that could strip a man down to his bones as neatly and savagely as a school of piranhas.

Rob ran from the ants through the house, pursued by his uncle, who was draped in a blanket that served as the amorphous shape of massing ants. Rob would race around the table with the ants gaining on him, knocking over chairs as they went. He’d gallop up the stairs with the ants at his heels, slam himself into his room, but the weight of the ants would force open the door. He’d jump on his bed with nowhere else to run or hide as the ants oozed over his feet and began to engulf him, while flushed and wild he’d beat at them with a pillow, tussling, wrestling, and finally, overpowered, nearly smothered by them, he’d have to scream, “Leiningen doesn’t die! The ants don’t get him! The ants don’t win!”

Only then, reminded of the authority of the story, would his uncle sink back, his acne feverish, hands shaking, and silently they’d both return downstairs, which was where Rob’s parents would find them, eating popsicles and watching the ball game, when they returned home.

* * *

Remembering his uncle, Rob had forgotten the ant. There was an obvious bad pun there at which The Woman Who Hates Puns would have groaned. But even had Rob said it aloud, she might not have heard him, for the ant had managed to work its way beneath Rob’s back and, seizing his belt with its mandibles, had lifted him off the ground the merest fraction of a millimeter, balancing Rob so perfectly that neither his head nor heels dragged. And having succeeded in carrying Rob across the boundary of Limbo, back into the ordinary world, the ant now proceeded at a considerably more determined pace.

They went along like that, hurrying away from his slumbering Love, like a grain of rice from a wedding.

Once, in college, broke and desperate, I kidnapped myself.

Ransom notes were sent to all interested parties. Later, I sent hair and fingernail clippings as well.

They steadfastly insisted on an ear.

“You’re going to leave your watch on?” she’d asked as if it were an offense on the order of undressing down to all but his socks.

Had there been a teasing note in her voice?

Earlier in the evening, at the bar, on their third drink and discussing favorite films, she’d said that she loved Hollywood movies from the thirties and forties for the banter between men and women. Myrna Loy and William Powell in The Thin Man ; Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night ; Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday ; and, of course, Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not , where Bacall delivers her famous zinger: “You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow.”

“The America the women and men in those black-and-white movies staked out between them seems so different from the here and now,” she said, nostalgic for a time and country she never lived in.

“Different how?” he asked.

“Well, for starters, they meant something very different by adult entertainment. Movies today star cartoons. The culture’s been totally infantilized.”

Outside the bar, the thunderstorm that had made catching a cab impossible continued to rumble. Neither of them had an umbrella. His first sight of her face had been through the spattered glass panels of the revolving door she’d entered just before he did — both of them ducking out of the downpour into the hotel bar.

The bartender wore livery — white jacket, maroon bow tie. Behind the mahogany bar, a two-story slab of cobalt mirror reflected bolts of spring lightning. Three empty barstools away, her reflection sat sipping a flute of champagne. Instead of a beer, he ordered a martini, not a drink he ever drank alone, and between flashes of lightning sneaked glances at her until their eyes met in the mirror. She seemed about to smile before glancing down at the glass she was raising to her lips. It gave him the nerve to try starting a conversation.

Excuse me , he might say, I couldn’t help noticing that you celebrate rain, too. That had the advantage of being true — he’d always loved the smell of rain — but as an ice-breaker, true or not, it sounded fake and nearly as precious as it would be to recite what he recalled from a poem about rain:

It’s raining women’s voices as if they’d died even in memory,

and it’s raining you as well marvellous encounters of my life …

He didn’t want the rain to let up.

What if he turned and said: I was just sitting here thinking how I’d be willing to bet that in every life there must be at least one instance when fate came disguised as weather.

“No umbrella, either?” he asked her. “I wonder if that makes us optimists?”

“Actually, I left mine on the train coming in,” she said. “The hotel loans them out but I didn’t think to take one. I’m not sure what that makes me. Distracted, maybe.”

“The train from where?” he asked, rather than “Distracted by what?”

By last call they’d returned to the subject of umbrellas. She’d begun to touch him lightly, reflexively, as one might to make a point, while recounting the story of how, on her ninth birthday, when she asked her mother for a clear plastic umbrella so that she could watch the raindrops fall, her mother told her, “Clair, dear, you don’t pay enough attention to where you’re going as is, let alone without staring up into the clouds.”

They were tipsy and laughing as they left the bar, not through the revolving door, but by a side exit that opened onto the hotel lobby.

And later in her room, maybe what she had actually asked was “Do you always leave your watch on?” That was a completely different kind of question — not banter. That was a question about history.