Justin Taylor - Flings - Stories

Leaves rustle in the breeze. The sun is high.

I know I ought to call someone, an authority, the authorities — police or animal control or 311. I can dial the gatehouse. Charles, or Guillermo or Rose, whoever is on duty, will know what to do. This development, this whole county, was swampland not so long ago. It’s not so crazy that a displaced creature would wander home again. This can’t be the first time it’s happened. There surely must be procedures in place. But he feels like my secret, even though he’s right out there in the open where anyone can see him and, for all I know, has. Perhaps some other, more prudent citizen has done the needful thing and made the call, is on the phone this very instant with a man in a county uniform who is saying, “Could y’all repeat that, please?” as though Mrs. Markowitz or whoever it chances to be were a crowd unto herself. But somehow I don’t think that’s happening. He is a beautiful animal and I think that he is mine.

In the house the phone is ringing. Not without reluctance, I get up and go into the living room, to the end table next to the couch. I check the name on the caller ID and my heart sinks: Ed Roman. Ed is a neighborhood man whose memory is shot. His wife, my friend Marlene, talks incessantly of the need to put him in a home, how she can’t bear to do such a thing, and the peace she will know when it is finally done.

“Hello,” I say, twisting and untwisting the curled phone cord as I squint across the living room, through the sliding glass door and past the patio, but the yard slopes in such a way that from where I’m standing the sleeping creature has fallen out of view.

“Hello, Carol,” Ed says. “How are you? Everything’s well?”

“Wonderful. I’m just finishing up the breakfast dishes. Would you like to talk to Gerald?”

“If you please.”

“Well, I’m afraid he’s out right now, Ed. A gator crawled out of the lake today and he chased it off with my broom. Foolhardy, I know, but that’s Gerald.”

“My God.”

“Then it was straight to the hardware store to price fencing.”

“Oh boy,” Ed says. “Now that’s a job.”

“What can I say, Ed? Gerald loves a project. I’ll tell him you called.”

“Thank you, dear.”

I hang up the phone and rush back outside, knowing with perfect certainty that the animal will be gone and then seeing that he is gone without a trace, no ripples in the water, no flat spot in the grass. I go back inside and get a rag and the 409 and go back out and wipe down the table and the chairs. I go back in and check the coffee and, finding it room temperature, serve myself some over ice in a clear glass mug and pour cream into it and watch as the cream seeps and trickles around the ice cubes and against the glass, the dark drink blurring pale. I take it back outside and sit down at my now clean table to wait, but nothing comes. Well, not nothing. There are blue jays and dragonflies; a gardener across the lake prunes back a flowering bush whose branches have grown across a doorway. An escaped house cat stalks a squirrel he’ll never catch — there’s a small brass bell hung from his collar — passing through the very space where the alligator slept.

The den is a beige room — they’re all beige rooms — with a big window and warm tiles because I never draw the shade. Gerald called the den the computer room because we keep our PC there. Keith set it up for us and whenever he’s over he’ll fuss with it — update programs, move folders around, whatever he does. Gerald used to pay close attention to these ministrations but he never seemed to understand what he saw. Me, I can check my email and otherwise prefer to ignore the computer altogether, but my sister, my God, she fills out these surveys. She finds these websites where you sign up and do them and then they send you coupons and gift cards. Elsie will fill out any survey if she wants what the reward is and if she doesn’t fit the criteria for respondents she lies. “If I didn’t I would never get to do any,” she says. “Nobody cares what an old woman thinks, but I make sure they know.”

So the in-box: There’s a summary of my accumulated points on a certain credit card, and three forwards from my brother-in-law, who has become a one-man distribution center for hoary old brain teasers, animated pictures of animals, political op-eds falsely attributed to celebrities, and racist knock-knock jokes. I don’t know where in creation he comes by such stuff, much less why he passes it along to me and the dozen or so other people on his email list. He never asks me if I’ve read these things or what I thought of them. For him, the payoff seems to be in the act of forwarding itself. I believe it makes him feel like a player in the modern world.

Marlene calls, beside herself: “You won’t believe what Ed said to me. I can’t even tell you, I shouldn’t, I’m sorry, but this is too much.”

“Honey,” I say to her. “You just let it all out.” As I listen to her talking and crying, I keep doing this thing where I wrap the phone cord tight around my fingers until it hurts, then count to five and let the cord go. The pads of my fingers blanch white and then flush pink again; it’s like watching the tide.

I have dinner with Keith and Heather. Their development is called Vista Trace. Tonight they’ve brought in takeout from a rotisserie chicken place that they call “the chicken place,” which is close enough to its real name that I wonder why they don’t just say the right thing. My daughter-in-law stabs at her steamed broccoli with a fork that already holds a wet flag of chicken skin draped over a corkscrew of mac and cheese. I break up an oily cornbread biscuit with my fingers, steal a glance at the clock.

In the old days I was never alone. When Elsie and I were girls we lived in Borough Park with lots of family nearby: cousins on every corner, or so it seemed. Our aunt Bessie had a candy store on Avenue J and Coney Island Avenue. That place! Like a dream now — only I’m not dreaming. I’m awake and wandering aimlessly in the old halls of my head. The candy store had a marble counter and a soda fountain and a big display of magazines and newspapers. We went there after school for a float or a sundae and for Bessie to watch us until Mom got off work. She worked in the office of a pocketbook factory and our father was a butcher. He’d been a garment salesman before the Depression, but when things got bad his father-in-law, my grandpa Izzy, said, “If you’re a butcher you’ll always eat, at least.” Izzy had been through hard times in Poland. So my father learned butchering and he was good right from the start but he hated it. He worked at a storefront on Union Street and after the War, when things turned around, he always talked about quitting but he never did. Maybe once he could have been something else, but the Depression had made him a butcher. We didn’t know all this as girls of course: who was struggling, what the reasons were, what they’d given up or lost. Everything seemed normal to us because it was all we knew, like Bessie’s husband, Morris, sitting in the back of the candy store, reading Torah — I used to know the Yiddish word for it, what they called the men who read Torah all day — and never helping with the store at all. She married him late and he worked her like a horse. Bessie did the books, she placed the orders, stood out front, everything, and probably the only reason she had taken him was to have kids — I mean it must have been — but either they couldn’t or he wouldn’t because they never did. Really Bessie was my great-aunt, Grandpa Izzy’s sister; they’d come over together in the 1890s, when she was about the same age as Elsie and I were when we used to go and sit at her shop. Such a strain on that woman! And on top of everything else being responsible for the two of us sitting at the marble counter, our school friends, too, swiveling our red stools so we spun in circles and crying if any soda should spill on our dresses. Bessie must have known by that time we were the closest she was going to get to girls of her own. After she died Morris sold the candy store, and so it passed out of our family and a few years after that it closed down. And to think that I’m older now than any of them were then — except maybe for Izzy, who left Poland not knowing his own birthday or exactly what year he’d been born. He always said, How can I worry about my age when I don’t even know it?