Lorrie Moore - Bark - Stories

“Too bad about the dead fish,” Milt said. “They’ll be gone next week but still. So may I!” He grinned.

Should she say “Don’t talk like that”? Should she in her bathing suit with her tattoos all showing feign a bourgeois squeamishness regarding conversations about death? “Please don’t talk like that,” she said, peach juice dripping down her chin.

“OK,” he said obediently. “I’m just saying: even Nature has her wickednesses.” He took out a flask she didn’t know he carried and poured her a little into a paper cup. “Here, have some gin. Goes in clean and straight — like German philosophy!” He smiled and looked out at the lake. “I was once a philosopher — just not a very good one.”

“Really?” The gin stung her lips.

“Terrible world. Great sky. That always seemed the gist.” He paused. “I also like bourbon — the particular parts of your brain it activates. Also good for philosophy.”

She thought about this. “It’s true. Bourbon hits a very different place than, say, wine.”

“Absolutely.”

“And actually, red wine hits a different place from white.” She sipped her gin. “Not that I’ve made an intense study of it.”

“No, of course not.” He smiled and rinsed gin around on his gums.

Back at his house he seemed to have caught a chill and she put a blanket around him and he grabbed her hand. “I have to go,” she said.

A sadness had overtaken him. He looked at KC then looked away. “Shortly before my wife died she sat up in bed and began to shout out the names of all the sick children who had died on her watch. I’d given her a brandy and she just began reciting the names of all the children she had failed to save. ‘Charlie Pepper,’ she cried, ‘and Lauren Cox and Barrett Bannon and Caitlin Page and Raymond Jackson and Tom DeFugio, and little Deanna Lamb.’ This went on for an hour.”

“I have to go — will you be OK?” He had taken his hand away and was just staring into space. “Here is my number,” she said, writing on a small scrap of paper. “Phone me if you need anything.”

When he did not reply she left anyway, ignoring any anguish, locking the door from the inside.

Perhaps everyone had their own way of preparing to die. Life got you ready. Life got you sad. And then blood started coming from where it didn’t used to come. People revisited the deaths of others, getting ready to meet them in the beyond. KC herself imagined dying would be full of rue: like flipping through the pages of a clearance catalog, seeing the drastic markdowns on stuff you’d paid full price for and not gotten that much use from, when all was said and done. Though all was never said and done. That was the other part about death.

“I had the dog all day,” complained Dench, “which was no picnic. No day at the beach.”

“Well, I had Milt. He’s no kiss for Christmas.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about all the time you spend with him.”

“According to you, you never know what to think.”

“It just seems to me that if things are going to take they shouldn’t take so long. By the way, I’ve found out what that odor is.”

“Really?”

The smell, even with the warm weather ostensibly drying things out, was still in the walls. There was the occasional scurrying of squirrels in the attic. It was surprising Cat didn’t jump up and start barking.

“The rot of a bad conscience.”

“I really doubt that.”

“Well, let me show you.” He opened the hatch to the crawl space that constituted the attic. He pulled down the folding ladder and motioned for her to climb it. “Take this flashlight and move it around and you’ll see.”

She expected to find a couple of flying squirrels, dead in each other’s caped arms. But when she poked her head into the crawl space and flashed her light around, she at first saw nothing but dust and boxes. Then her eyes fell on it: a pile of furry flesh with the intertwined tails of rats. They were a single creature like a wreath and flies buzzed around them and excrement bound them at the center while their bodies were arrayed like spokes. Only one of them still had a head that moved and it opened its mouth noiselessly.

“It’s a rat king,” said Dench. “They were born like that, with their tails attached, and could never get away.”

She scrambled down the ladder and shoved it back up. “That is the most revolting thing I’ve ever seen.”

“They’re supposed to be bad luck.”

“Put the hatch door back down.”

“A surprise for Ian. I did phone the pest removal place, but they charge a thousand dollars. I said, ‘Where are you taking them to, Europe?’ We may just have to burn the house down. It’s completely haunted.”

“Really.”

“We could work up plausible deniability: What kerosene can? Or, Many people are known to go shopping while cooking pot-au-feu .”

She studied Dench’s face as if — once again — she had no idea who he was. Now having found the rat king, he seemed to be the star of a horror film. He was trying to be funny all the time and she no longer liked it, as if he were auditioning for something. Soon he might start telling Milt’s jokes: I keep thinking of the hereafter: I walk into a room and say, What am I here after ? She only liked Dench’s Jesus jokes, since in them Jesus was kind of an asshole, which she thought was perhaps a strong possibility in real life, and so the jokes seemed true and didn’t have to be funny and so she didn’t have to laugh. “Don’t ever show me anything like that again,” she said.

Cat came up and started to hump Dench’s leg. “Sheesh,” said Dench, as KC turned to leave. “He’s had his balls cut off and he still wants to date.”

Summer warmed all the houses though most of them did not have air conditioners, Ian’s and Milt’s included. She took Milt one evening to a nearby café and they had to dine outside, at a wobbly metal table near the parking lot, since the air within was too slicing and cold. “I think I would have liked that cold air when I was about seventeen,” he said. “Now I feel heat is good for old bones.”

They ate slowly, and although the food clung to his teeth, KC did not alert him. What would be the point? At some point, good God, just let an old guy have food in his teeth! They ate squash soup with caramel corn on top — molar-wrecking.

“You know,” he said, chewing and looking around. “People get fired from the barbershop, a restaurant closes, this is a slow town and still things change too fast for me. It’s like those big-screen TVs: all the bars have them now. I can’t watch football on those — it feels like they’re running right at me.”

KC smiled but said nothing. At one point he said loudly of his custard, “The banana flavor doesn’t taste like real banana but more like what burped banana tastes like.”

She glanced over at the next table. “I kind of know what you mean,” she said quietly.

“Of course old people are the stupidest. It’s the thing that keeps me from wanting to live in a whole facility full of them. Just listen to them talk: listen to me talk. It’s like: I’ve been walking around with the dumb thought for forty years and I’m still thinking it, so now I might as well say it over and over.” He then again sang the praises of his wife, her generosity and social commitment, and then turned his attention to KC. “You are not unlike her, in a way,” he said. Behind him the sun set in the striped hues of a rutabaga.

“I can’t imagine,” she said. Instead her mind was filled with wondering what the neighbors must think.

“Your faces are similar in a way. Especially when you smile!” He smiled at her when he said this and she returned it with a wan one of her own, her lips in a tight line.