Doug Dorst - The Surf Guru

I turned to go, but Trace grabbed my arm.

“Chip and Alice,” somebody sang. “Sitting in a tree.”

Chip opened the box, and there they were. All twelve of them, black as Bibles. Everyone shut up. A few people noticed my hands. Chip stood there with his mouth open. I felt grateful not to be him. I may have laughed, from relief.

“What’s wrong with you?” the bald guy said to me. “Why would you do this to someone?”

Before I could say anything, Trace put his finger in the guy’s chest and said, “Don’t shoot the messenger, fucko.”

I watched Chip. Understanding crept into his face in a deepening red. “I think,” he said quietly, still looking at the roses, “I think you guys should get the hell out of here.”

I led Trace away. Someone called us assholes.

“Hey,” Trace said as we pulled away from the curb. “That guy stiffed you on the tip.”

“Plenty of people don’t tip me,” I said. “This guy had a reason not to.”

“It’s a matter of respect for the working man,” he said. “You have mouths to feed.”

“I have mouths?”

“I’m kind of hungry,” he said. His good eye crinkled up. Under the mask, he was smiling.

“To the diner, then,” I said. “My treat, I guess.”

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” he said. “Right now I should be with Mo. She and I both had to stare down Death today.”

We were on an overpass, and beneath us cars flew brightly down the parkway. I said, “We could be in Mexico in three days if we headed south right now.”

He lit the pipe again, passed it to me. “We can’t go without Mo. Especially since she’s the only one who knows Spanish.”

I exhaled. “Do you know anyone named Archer?” I asked.

“Don’t think so. Who’s that?”

“It’s just a name I heard,” I said, and I thought, Just a name, just one name standing in for all the men who are better than you and me .

Mo was sitting on her front steps, dressed, waiting and smoking. Trace thanked me and got out. I was going to tell him to take Archer’s roses and give them to her, but I decided Mo was right: I ought to use them myself. I deserved to.

I watched as Trace hugged her. She touched his bandage gently, and he said something I couldn’t make out and they laughed. I honked as I pulled away from the curb, and they waved at me.

This was my plan for the roses: I would go back to Smiley’s and get Alice the orange girl’s address out of the files. I would bring her the red roses and show her that her bad luck had boomeranged into good.

I drove to the store and parked the van in front, because Smiley bolted the back door after hours. I unlocked the front door and stepped in over the electric eye that triggered “Edelweiss.” The light was on in the back room. I heard a clatter and a yelp, and I ran to the doorway. I saw Smiley on top of Charlotte on the workbench, pumping away. They were naked. They looked pale and waxy under the fluorescent light.

Smiley stopped and looked at me, a smirk creeping up from the corner of his mouth. Charlotte tilted her head back over the edge of the bench and looked at me upside down. Her blond hair reached almost to the floor, where clothes and scissors and ribbon rolls and stems of baby’s breath were scattered around. I could still smell paint fumes, faintly.

“I’ll just go now,” I said.

“Bright and early tomorrow,” Smiley said. “No more of this late shit, okay?”

“No more,” I said. “I swear.”

“ Hasta, then.”

“Good-bye,” said upside-down Charlotte.

That night I went to a bar a few towns over, where I didn’t know anyone. The place was quiet. I was sitting by myself, tracing wet rings on the scarred oak, when a guy tapped me on the shoulder and started grunting at me. No words, just sounds, nasal and urgent. I told him to leave me alone. The last thing I wanted to do was try to figure someone else out. But the guy just got louder, more insistent, and he started jabbing his finger at me. I was about to knock him down when I realized he was pointing behind me, pointing at two women sitting at the end of the bar. Late thirties, both of them, and they looked like they’d seen some hard miles. One had straight brown hair crimped into little rows of waves. The other one wore a shade of bright pink lipstick I’d once seen on a dead old lady Black Swede showed me in the basement of the funeral home. These two women were staring at the TV, which was announcing the lottery numbers that nobody had matched. I turned back to the guy and he was smiling and making his noises, happier-sounding now. He pointed at me, then at himself, then at the women. I finally got it. He was deaf. “You want me to talk to them for you?” I said. “For us?”

His hands tightened into happy little fists, and his head bobbed up and down — yes yes yes. I pitied him. He thought he’d found words in me.

On an after-hours tour of the natural history museum, my friend the herpetologist shows me the laboratory in which, fifty years ago, the division’s curator gathered with several colleagues to puzzle over an African tree snake that the city zoo had sent for identification. Thirty inches long, bright green and black-beaded, with folding rear fangs: it was almost certainly a boomslang, they agreed, but for the matter of the anal plate, which ought to have been divided but wasn’t. The men were confounded; this snake was a taxonomical impossibility. The curator picked it up for a closer look, but he took his grip too far behind the head and the snake whipped around and struck, burying those rear fangs into the soft flesh at the base of his thumb. That it was a boomslang was dramatically manifested by its behavior , the curator would write. Still, they all agreed, the snake was young and had been in captivity for some time, so it wouldn’t possess venom in enough quantity or potency for the bite to be fatal. The curator did the old cut-and-suck, then retreated to his office to chronicle his symptoms as the hemotoxin pulsed through his body.

By two-thirty, the area around the puncture had blackened. By four, he had developed chills that shook him as he donned his overcoat and headed for the suburban train. On the train, he noted waves of nausea. At home, in bed with heating pad, pencil, and notebook, he recorded continued nausea, a fever spike, bleeding from the mouth. Midnight: blood in urine. Later, just blood — no urine — plus abdominal pain and violent nausea. In the morning, heavy-lidded and sore, he paused in his writing and asked his wife to call the museum and say he’d be back at work the following day. Mouth and nose continuing to bleed, though not excessively , he wrote. This was his final entry. He fell into a coma. By three-fifteen p.m., he was dead. His colleagues, though saddened, told the newspapers that a good herpetologist never misses an opportunity to record a case study. His wife’s thoughts on this subject were not reported.

The office that once belonged to the late curator is locked (and it has someone else’s nameplate on it, besides), but I linger there, one hand on the dark-grained wood, and I imagine him in his office that afternoon, in his creaky chair behind his bulky desk, staring at his hand as he flexes his swollen thumb. Along one wall are maps of southern Africa, India, the Pantanal; along another are two tall and packed-tight bookshelves. At his back, a window open to the lake breeze. On his desk, a gila monster’s skull serves as a paperweight. Perhaps he has a moment of doubt. Perhaps he finds himself with the telephone in his good hand, about to connect to the hospital, but he turns his gaze to the clock on his wall (brutishly plain, as institutional clocks are, with cold black numbers on a white face and a second hand that buzzes, insectlike, as it sweeps its arc) and decides he can catch the next train home if he hurries.