Stuart Dybek - Ecstatic Cahoots - Fifty Short Stories

“Maybe if you’d do something besides sitting around in your dirty underwear, drinking and belching, things wouldn’t be so BORrrr-ing,” Trish answered.

Once, after an argument that made Trish storm off in tears, Jay held his head and muttered, as if more to himself than to me, “I never told this to anyone, but me and the Mrs. had to get married.”

By the time the leaves were falling, they had shed their wedding clothes. Trish wore a dress cut from one of my sweat socks, boots of bumblebee fur, and a hat made from a hummingbird’s nest. Jay, bearded, a blue-jay feather poking from his top hat, dressed in the gray skin of an animal he refused to identify. He carried a knitting-needle spear, a bow he’d fashioned from the wishbone of a turkey, and a quiver of arrows — disposable hypodermic needles he’d scavenged from Uncle Kirby’s supplies. He tipped each arrow in cottonmouth venom.

They never appeared now without first scavenging Uncle Kirby’s storehoused supplies — at least, they called it scavenging. Uncle Kirby called it guerrilla warfare. He kept scrupulous inventories of his stockpiles, and detected, almost immediately, even the slightest invasion. Yet no matter how carefully he protected his supplies, Jay found ways to infiltrate his defenses. Jay avoided poisons, raided traps, short-circuited alarms, picked locks, solved combinations, and carried off increasing amounts of Uncle Kirby’s stuff. Even more than the loss of supplies, Jay’s boldness and cleverness began to obsess Uncle Kirby.

“Hey, You ,” Uncle Kirby told me. “You’re about to witness something you’ll remember the rest a your life — short as that might be, given the way you’re goin’ at it. Kirby Versus the Varmints!”

It was the season to worry about supplies, to calculate the caches of food and jerry cans of water, the drums of fuel oil surrounded by barbed wire, the cords of scrap wood. Each night the wind honed its edge sharper in the bare branches. Each night came earlier. Lit by the flicker of my kerosene stove, Jay plucked the turkey bow as if it were an ancient single-stringed instrument. He played in accompaniment to the wind and to Trish’s plaintive singing — an old folk song, she said, called “Expectations.” The wind and the wandering melody reminded me of the sound of the ghostly frequencies on my shortwave. The ghostly frequencies were all I could pick up anymore, except for a station from far north on the dial that sounded as if it were broadcasting crows.

“Listen,” Jay said, amused, “they’re giving the crow financial report: ‘Tuck away a little nest egg.’”

While we huddled around the stove, listening to the newscast of crows, Uncle Kirby was in his workshop, working late over an endless series of traps, baited cages, zappers. He invented the KBM (Kirby Better Mousetrap), the KRS (Kirby Rodent Surprise), and the KSPG (Kirby Small Pest Guillotine), which worked well enough in testing to cost him the tip of his little finger. Some of these inventions actually worked on rodents, and Uncle Kirby took to displaying his trophies by their tails. He devised trip wires, heat sensors, and surveillance monitors, but when Jay’s raids continued despite Uncle Kirby’s best efforts, the exhilaration of combat turned nasty. We were sitting at the supper table one evening over Kirby Deluxe — leftover meat loaf dipped in batter and deep-fried — and I’d stashed away a couple of bites along with a few canned peas for Jay and Trish when Uncle Kirby suddenly said, “All right, You , what’s with the food in your cuffs?”

I tried to think of some reason he might believe, and realized we were beyond that, so I just hung my head over my plate.

“Look, You ,” Uncle Kirby said, shaking his bandaged hand in my face, “there’s something mysterious going on here. I don’t know what little game you’re playin’, but I think a preemptive strike’s in order.”

He left me trussed to a kitchen chair, and that night he handcuffed my ankle to the bunk. It was the night of the first snow. Jay appeared late, kicking the snow from his moleskin boots.

“Trish asked me to say goodbye for her, Old Boy,” Jay said. “It’s getting a bit barbarous around here, you know.”

I turned my face to the wall.

“She said to tell you that she wants to name the baby after you, unless it’s a girl, of course, in which case Old Boy wouldn’t be appropriate.”

I didn’t laugh. When you’re trying to hold back tears, laughing can suddenly make you cry.

“This isn’t like us going off on a honeymoon, Old Boy,” Jay said. He was busy picking the lock on the handcuffs with his knitting-needle spear. “We never did get to the Motel d’Amore, but that time we spent here in summer, that was the honeymoon. I never told this to anyone, but maybe someday you’ll understand, if you’re lucky enough to meet someone who’ll make you feel as if your heart is wearing a tuxedo, as if your soul is standing in a chapel in the moonlight and your life is rushing like a limo running red lights, you’ll understand how one day you open your eyes and it’s as if you find yourself standing on top of a wedding cake in the middle of the road, an empty highway, without a clue as to how you got there, but then, that’s all part of coming out of nowhere, isn’t it?”

When they didn’t return the next night, I knew I’d never see them again, and I picked the lock as I’d seen Jay do with the knitting needle he’d left behind, and cut the cans and shoes off my bike and took off, too. It wasn’t easy. Uncle Kirby had booby-trapped the perimeter. I knew he’d come looking for me, that, for him, finding me would seem like something out of the only story he’d ever read me—“The Most Dangerous Game.” But I knew about my own secret highway — I never told this to anyone — a crumbling strip of asphalt, a shadow of an old two-lane, overgrown, no more of it left than a peeling center stripe through a swamp. I rode that center stripe as if balanced on the edge of a blade. It took me all the way to here.

At midnight the expedition of the bride and groom arrives at the Fridge and pauses to get its bearings from the pale, arctic twenty-watt sun before proceeding across a border there is no need to map.

Before them lies the taiga where the wolf vowel of wind penetrates the heart with the aim of a winter draft through an uncaulked bedroom window — a draft that feels its way down corridors of sleep, its Freon breath scented with the rotten moss of unmade salads and wilted scallions.

And beyond the taiga, a tundra stretches that, from its smell, must be the snow-blinding white of sour milk.

There’s a sadness locked away here that emerges slowly like the freezer-burned flavors from some glacial past molded into cubes of ice. There’s a cheese never meant to be blue. There are undesired dreams and memories preserved in an isolation in which dream and memory have become indistinguishable from one another, both smoldering like ghosts of cold around a temperature dial forced beyond its lowest subtraction.

Here are the silent regions of rock-hard meat frozen into obscene postures like the dead around Stalingrad, regions where body heat has vanished beneath a crust of frost, where breath hangs although the breathers are long gone; dangerous regions where, even after the plug has been pulled, love can still be smothered as if it were a child playing hide-and-seek in a junked appliance.

It was Martin who kidnapped the French doll with her bald skull fractured beneath a wig of spun gold and her chipped blue eyes that clattered up into her brain. He kidnapped her from his cousin, Terra, after Terra had raised the doll’s red velvet frock and pulled down its yellowed muslin undies in order to demonstrate the differences in anatomy between them. She had asked Martin, who was younger than she was, if he wanted to see what girls looked like and when he said okay Terra led him into her bedroom and closed the door behind them.