Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

He regarded Euple, who was standing there looking across the street at some pocket of air and working his jaw in a minor fashion, old desiccated lips parted and a crust of something pale in the corners, running through the grainy film of his days. He moved on.

Euple’s discourse on beans had dislodged a pocket of breakfast gas stuck around Finus’s ribs and it rumbled like a bubble in the bathtub making for the surface, but downward through Finus. He stopped, leaned a little against a building wall and let it brattle out, went on his way. He hardly bothered to conceal a fart anymore, and hardly dealt more than one or two a day anyway. They rarely seemed to have much odor beyond something akin to the sweetfeed you give a horse — corn, with dank rich molasses. He could track their progress through the tract. Sometimes on one side of his abdomen a creaking would begin, and sound really like the joyous squawks and burblings and intermittent drumming of a woodpecker on a grubby old tree in the woods. Then directly on the other side of his abdomen would answer the bird’s mate, a little higher on the scale, of a different warble and rhythm, as if they were just letting each other know where they dined. And then brrraaapppt! like they’d both found the hot spot and hammered away. Back before his surgery and the moderation of his diet he’d had a big problem with gas, seemed sometimes his body existed for nothing more than to produce it, as if he were fossilizing and mineralizing like some ancient buried dinosaur in the brief span of his earthly years. In that time he figured he’d produced just about every variety of methane odor a human is capable of producing, until Orin Heath had assisted Mack Modica in the removal of several malignant polyps from Finus’s colon, including a large section of the colon itself. Before they’d done this they’d irrigated him, cleaned him out with a pressure hose, it felt like, and what had at first been simple discomfort, and then grave discomfort, had then progressed into a kind of relief, a sense of a cleansing, which had then become a sort of euphoria, a moment of absolute clarity, which had then intensified to the point that he felt like his brain was on fire, tiny geysers of flame were firing from the pores in his head, couldn’t they see it? And also he had a pain down lower, but not in his ass, instead in his groin, and he peeked down to a teen boner, one of those threatened to split the skin. He tried to reach down to hide it but his arms were gently pressed back to the sheet by the firm soft hand of a fleshy nurse whose breasts he could see straight through her clothing, like X-ray vision, saw her nipples grow hard and erect before his gaze, and he looked into her eyes and saw it was Adelphia Morrisette, the daughter of Blaise Morrisette, the druggist, a girl he’d often watched bend over to stock the shelving when she was just a teenage girl helping out after school, and in that moment during the visionary irrigation he could imagine with astonishing reality his rejuvenated prick poking its way through her wiry blond pubic hair and into slick glandular softness, young tight softness, and he felt her fingers press into the flesh of his head in a grip that could have been her manifest ecstasy.

— What’s he trying to do? a nurse said.

— Hold him, he’s bucking.

They held him. Lying there, in exquisite pain, he was recalling something from school, as a boy. Fellows out in the schoolyard, describing relations of the garden variety. Finus, who’d thought himself imaginative, was astonished.

— Come on, Bates, the farm boy twanged, back on his heels, a derisive squint, you can’t tell me you’ve never fucked a melon.

HERE WAS IVYLOY’S shop now, Finus’s own ectoplasmic reflection in the glass overlaying the image of Ivyloy himself, who stood at ease with one arm on the back of his barber chair in a dream, like a heron seeming to gaze at nothing just above Finus’s head. He woke up, smiled and raised his eyebrows, just about the only hair on his big round head set up on a long skinny neck and tall bony frame. Must be a hard irony to live with, a bald barber, Finus thought, and walked on in.

— Hey, boy, have a seat. Ivyloy popped the apron out and when Finus sat he draped it over Finus’s lap while he fastened a trimming collar around his neck, then he tied the apron, swung Finus around to look in the mirror.

— What’ll it be, just a shave, or a trim, too?

— Shave, Finus said, appraising himself. -Used to be I needed a haircut every other day.

— Used to be lots of things I needed every day, Ivyloy said. He leaned Finus’s chair back and laid a hot towel across his face. -Then I got married. He hummed to himself as he worked up a lather in the soap cup. Finus could see the TV reflected in the mirror. Three women were on a talk show set, fighting, two burly men trying to keep them apart. The big woman threw her chair at the littlest one, who deflected it with her own like a swashbuckling lion tamer.

— Why don’t you ever turn on the sound? Finus said.

— I don’t want to hear it, Ivyloy said. -Just like to have the pictures moving around.

Ivyloy bent to the task, stretching a bit of cheek here and there, taking care around the jawline, stretching the skin on Finus’s neck where it dewlapped. He concentrated on the jawbone behind Finus’s right ear. On the television two muscle-bound men came up behind the two women and put them into something like half nelsons. Ivyloy’s razor skritched down into the low part of his neck, near the shirt collar, and gave Finus a pleasant prickling. He closed his eyes, to the television, to Ivyloy’s fluorescent lightbulbs, to the slanted golden light through the barbershop’s window. And in some space of time could have been years he felt the tug of a new hot towel dabbing the shaving soap away from his skin. He opened his eyes, back in time.

Ivyloy dried Finus’s face, slapped a little Mennen onto his cheeks and under his jaw and chin, then rinsed and dried his own hands as Finus stood up and palmed out a ten, received his change.

— I heard you tell about Birdie and Midfield this morning, Ivyloy said.

Finus said, — I been writing them up.

— What’s the high points?

— Nothing spectacular.

— Hmph, Ivyloy said, looking out the window. -I know you. Be writing it, She once stood accused of poisoning her husband, her crazy in-laws threatening to dig up his body and hash it out .

Finus just stared at him.

Ivyloy said, — Don’t get riled, now.

Finus looked away. In a moment, he said, — And how’s Miss Sadie?

— She’s like you, you can’t kill her. You could run that woman over with one of them big things flattens out fresh pavement, one of them big flatteners, you’d just have you a new pothole when she riz’ up, shape of Sadie.

— Say she’s a tough one.

— I done tried to kill that woman a thousand times.

— Go on, now.

— Run her over, shot her, tossed her off a cliff up in Tennessee, give her rat poison and buried her in the backyard, she just comes back in that evening while I’m having my coffee, whups my ass like a stray dog. Woman’s tough, now. No, she’s gone kill me with time, her life’s mission is to outlive me.

Finus stood there nodding, looking at him.

— Now, I know you love that old gal, he said.

— Like my own life, Ivyloy said. -What there is left of it. Hey, you must a written me up years ago.

— I have not, Finus said. -You may be brain-dead but I can wait till you stop breathing, anyway.

Ivyloy looked a little pained, but he laughed.

— Aw, hell! he called out then, as if singing a note. -I don’t believe it. You got files on ever one of us.

Finus ignored him and glanced into the mirror.