Stanley Elkin - Mrs. Ted Bliss

So if there were a new baleboss in town, unlikely as it seemed, it had to be old Junior who baked the bread. How different was the way he plotted his campaigns from the way Dorothy had once planned meals for her family? Peculiarly, not that she gave him any credit for it, this made him seem all the more male in her eyes. Driven, she meant, unable or unwilling to let anything go, his hold on life greedy with strength. (She knew, for example, that even after discounting the two or three-year seniority she held over him he was bound to outlive her, to outlive everyone with whom he had struggled for edge over the course of his life.)

“But what did you come up with? Never mind,” he said, glancing at her tools, “those ain’t even got dust on them. I could eat off your trowel.” He picked up her metal detector. “Is it turned on? Are you sure you even know how to work this?”

“I flip the toggle switch. I make little half circles.”

“Well,” Yellin said, “maybe you hit a dry hole here. But that’s hard to buy into. I mean this place is a billion years old, you had to come across something. Beer tabs, bottle caps. The key from a sardine can. A tin of old condoms, for Christ’s sake.”

He spoke as if she’d let him down. Surprisingly, she was not at all surprised.

“No,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss coolly, “no beer tabs, no bottle caps. None of that other stuff either.” She wanted to tell him she had found gold — what do you call them? — doubloons, silver spoons, forks, shining jewels set in precious metal rings. That she held her tongue was a tribute to the great age she knew he would live to be, a lonely old man surviving his children and grandchildren, surviving everyone he had ever known or taken advantage of. She did not wish to add her sarcasm to the weight of his possible regrets.

“It could be defective, I suppose,” Yellin said. “Let me take it out for a spin.”

Dorothy Bliss shrugged and Junior, reactivating the machine he had just switched off so as not to drain its batteries, began going over what seemed to Mrs. Bliss exactly the same ground she and the little girl had previously covered.

“We already did over th—”

“Quiet,” he said, “I think I’ve got something. Hand me that shovel.” He scratched furiously at the packed sand as if he’d hit pay dirt. “See” he said, “see?”

“Have you found something? Is something there?”

“My God,” Yellin said, “it’s sending out signals like a sinking ship. Give me a hand, will you? Use the hoe, get the trowel. Yes, right, good girl, bring the brush.”

Mrs. Ted Bliss, excited, in the sand, on her knees, beside him, leaned into her effort. Breathlessly, she pulled sand from the hole he was digging as if she were bailing the beach. But for the pressure she felt along her arms and in her chest (and her fury), it might have been more than a half century earlier on the shore of Lake Michigan with her children and nephews and nieces, Mrs. Bliss dispensing pail-and-shovel lessons, overseeing pretend burials. The thought brought her up short. She dropped her hoe. (Marvin was dead, some of his cousins; not buried to the neck in Lake Michigan sand but in that cold Chicago boneyard, even their nostrils clogged with dirt, covered by death shmuts.)

“No,” Yellin said, “don’t let up. Why are you stopping?”

Mrs. Bliss shrugged. “What’s the use?” she said.

“What’s that, philosophy? The use is we’re onto something here. Christ, Dorothy, this is hot work.”

Yellin stopped just long enough to wipe his face and neck with a handkerchief, then quickly resumed. “Listen to that. Your metal detector’s beeping away to beat the band. The sound wasn’t nearly as loud at my dig.”

What was he talking about? What beeping? What sound?

“What beeping?” she said. “What sound?”

He stopped digging.

“What beeping? What sound? You don’t hear it?”

“No,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.

“Jeez, Dorothy, don’t you have your hearing aid in?”

“Sure I do,” she said.

“You see?” Yellin said. “You see what happens you don’t go for the upscale model? Where are your bells and whistles? On my device there’s even a light that flashes when you’re over something. The bigger the find, the brighter the light. That’s the sort of thing you need.”

She thought of the light Frank had installed on the phone in her bedroom. She thought of all the people she’d missed who said there’d been no answer when they pressed on her buzzer. Not so many. Maybe not so many who said that they had.

“It’s a good thing I came over,” Junior said. “We would have missed this, whatever it is.” He took up his position again over the hole he had dug in the sand. “Wait,” he said, “I think I just heard the shovel clink against something solid. Give me a second here.”

Dorothy watched as Junior Yellin moved the shovel aside and reached his arm deep into the hole, almost as far as his shoulder. “My hand is on it,” he said, making no sound but moving his lips. Before he pulled it out he looked over at Dorothy, staring at her, she thought, almost murderously. “This is a fifty-fifty arrangement, you understand. I mean by actual legal rights it probably ought to be sixty-forty, but I’m bringing you into it because you’re my friend, you staked the claim, and it was your machine even though you missed it and I ended up having to do all the work.”

She watched him carefully.

“What do you say, Dorothy? Shake?”

She couldn’t believe this son of a bitch, but thinking again how long he’d survive her and wishing him only the saddest, dreariest memories, she put her hand out slowly and slipped it into his. Junior smiled. “Done? All right then, done. A deal’s a deal!” he said triumphantly. “So let’s see what we got here.”

He jerked his hand away as if he’d been stung. “Jesus! Son of a bitch! I think I cut myself.” His knuckles and fingers were covered with wet, compacted sand, almost the texture and color of mud. “Can you see, am I bleeding?”

“I don’t see any blood.”

“Some of this buried shit can be jagged, sharp. That’s why they say to wear gloves. You could get a very ancient strain of tetanus. No,” Yellin said, “I don’t see any blood either. I was lucky. That stuff can be a bitch to cure. More painful than rabies shots, they say.”

Mrs. Bliss nodded.

“Think I could use your scarf to wrap around my hand?”

“You give me fifty-five.”

“Ri-i-ght,” Yellin said. “There’s life in the old girl yet, hey Dorothy?” He winked. “Okay,” he said, and reached down into the hole again. “He stuck in his thumb, and pulled out a — Jesus, Mary, and Joe,” he said. “What do you suppose this is?”

Hand over hand he drew more of it up.

The metal had lost definition. It was corroded, discolored, had been transmuted, undergone some heavily inverted oxidation by age and weight and water. Vaguely, pieces resembled figure eights, others, enormous, indistinguishable lumps of wadded gray chewing gum. Mrs. Bliss, who’d never seen anything like it, recognized it at once.

“They’re shackles,” she said. “For slaves. Shipped over from the islands.”

“Jesus, you think?”

“Shackles. Handcuffs. Neck rings and leg irons.”

“For shvartzers?”

Mrs. Bliss looked at this Junior Yellin. “For the doorman. For the girl who comes to clean once a week. For the man who brings the car around.”

“Escaped? You think maybe escaped? I mean we’re a little too south of plantation country. They couldn’t have been tobacco and cotton niggers, do you suppose?”

“There’s storms,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “Ships founder and sink. Rocks scrape their sides and they go down.”