Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

Earl, it’s me, Birdie.

Only a murmuring from within. The particles of the earth hummed and spread apart like sand on vibrating glass so she could see him as through a grainy television screen. His old moldered body shivered, mushroomy eyelids blinked once or twice, a mossy old bone-stretched mummy he was, mustache grown long and flowing down into his armpits. His hands lay on his stitched and blackened chest. He coughed.

That’s what you get for all that smoking, she said. Otherwise you’d be up and about like me, maybe moved on.

But then, she thought, I’d a had to put up with you all those years.

Wasn’t the smoking, he said. How can you say that? Look what’s happened here. He ran his withered fingers over the stitching on his chest.

Well it looks awful. I never knew they cut you open.

Worse than that, Earl said.

What are you saying?

I felt fine, leaving the house. Driving out to the lake I felt a tingling spread down into my chest, like when your arm or leg has gone to sleep. Got to the woodpile, started splitting some chunks, raised up for a chop, had the ax in the air, felt something let go, felt like, and just kept on going up, with the ax, all the way.

Well ain’t that the way it happens? she said. I come through a birdsong.

I felt my heart, though. Squeezed like to field-dress a rabbit. It turned to a little ball of fire in my chest.

In another hand he then held his liver for her to see, a hard flat stone likened to the head of a caveman’s club, and colorless.

And here’s my kidneys, he said, reaching into his side and removing a couple of little withered yellow beans.

All that coffee, Birdie said.

They were silent a moment. He seemed to squint through the lacy growth on his eyes.

You were the prettiest thing, he said, it’s just a shame. We weren’t suited, were we.

I know I was pretty, but I was too young. I didn’t want to get married. You all ganged up on me cause Papa thought it best. But I should have said no. It wasn’t your fault.

Oh, well.

I’m going on, Earl.

Earl lifted his gnarled and blackened lungs.

Could you take these, they lay so heavy on me now.

She turned away. The soil sifted together again, and the grass snakelike intertwined, and she moved over the silent graveyard, once again all in the present air.

EVEN SO, GUILT gave way to the stench of his cursed feet, curling back through some root or worm or aggregating grit so that Earl recalled and relived a moment insignificant in the long thin line of his brief life, a line that focused and broadened into the Brooklyn Bridge, in the middle of which he stood beside the tower smoking a Camel and fanning himself with a copy of the Herald beneath the lantern hanging from the tower. One thing you’d think about being up north is at least it’d be cooler, but no. Hot and humid, and not a breeze but the occasional stinker full of exhaust and rotten trash. He wriggled his toes inside his socks, felt a little grimy. All that stone and macadam.

He smelled the woman before he saw her, smelled her not so much over as through the smoke of his cigarette, and cut his eyes to see her sashaying, the very word, toward him, a scissoring walk, one leg crossing over the other as it landed, well he’d see how that worked in another territory. She was wearing a Tweedie, a perfect fit on her size six and a half, but only because he’d fit her, as she’d be wearing a six were it not for him, and not nearly so happy to be sashaying across the bridge in them as she was right now. A woman with a roomy shoe is a woman with happy feet, and a woman with happy feet is a happy woman, a woman who has learned how to curl her toes outward instead of inward. Squeeze a woman’s foot when you’re fitting her shoe and, if she’s game, you’re her man, simple as that, unless you’re some kind of toad, and even then you’d have more of a shot than most men. It was the blessing and the curse of the business, for sure, but he was trying to make the best of it. He had license, anyway. A man whose wife gave it to him on the average of once or twice a year at best, and looking like it would only get worse, had plenty of license in his book.

The six-and-a-half had come into the store on his last day there so wouldn’t she be some kind of reward? He saw it that way, and it was like she did too. On Monday he’d be some thirteen blocks away, opening another store, getting it going, two more stores and he would get the hell out of New York and back home for a while, but that’d be another two months. It would take at least eight women to get him through eight more weeks in New York. Some men loved New York but you could have it, have the stinking sewers and screaming subways and yapping yankees, most of them ugly as mongrel dogs. Sounded like a waddling flock of honking geese when they spoke. Birdie said she wished he’d take her and Ruthie up to be with him when he had to be away so long but he’d said he wouldn’t take them to that place to live for a million dollars a year, and meant it, and not because of the strange pussy, he could get that her along or no. But what man would bring his family to live in such a place had they not been condemned to it from the beginning? Best stay home where you can still smell something other than piss on flagstone when you step out the door in the morning, he’d said.

Of course Brooklyn wasn’t so bad in that way. The problem with Brooklyn was it was a foreign country. We couldn’t live there, he said, we speak English. You wouldn’t be able to order groceries unless you spoke Italian or Hebrew, he said. Jews and Wops and old-country drunken Irishmen, and crowded with them. And you won’t find a nigger to do for you the way you will back home. You’d best stay here and wait this out, I’ll have my own store back home soon.

So the six-and-a-half walks in that afternoon about three in a black dress, a warm day in May and she’s cool, just a little sweat beading through her makeup, a little veil from her hat brim shading her eyes, red lipstick, and stands there uncomfortably, looking sort of at him, sort of at the displays, and he can tell she’s in way too small of a shoe, so he goes over and touches her elbow and says quietly, Good afternoon ma’am why don’t you have a seat and let me make your life a lot more comfortable for a change? And when he eased her shoes off and gave a quick squeeze across the ball of her foot and pressed a light and quick thumb into the arch and ran it forward he could hear the barely audible exhalation that told him, All right here’s one for the plucking.

At the end of the bridge he hailed a cab and they took it to his tiny apartment in Brooklyn. On the way up the stairs he didn’t try to time his steps to creak with hers as he had when he first moved in and brought home a woman. He’d hear a lot of crap from the landlord and landlady next day but they wouldn’t have the courage to say anything till then, so to hell with them. Always threatening to kick him out but they didn’t want to kick him out, too much trouble to get someone else, just loved to shout and shake their fists and claim they were going to kick him out. Fucking Wops. Genufuckingflect yourself over this.

He showed her the bathroom and bedroom and went into the living room to open the windows and smoke while she got ready. He was looking down on trees in smoky lamplight, the brick sidewalk showing through gaps in the leaves here and there, feeling lucky as always that at least he lived in a place here where there were a few trees growing from between the bricks. A man walked by his shoes clopping, whistling something that might have been religious, one of those old hymns that sounded like a marching number, like “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” None of his family except Mama had ever given a damn about religion so she’d tried to make up for them all. He’d told Birdie she could give a dollar a week and he’d take whatever that would buy him in the next world.