Rikki Ducornet - Brightfellow

“Who? who?” Pea Pod screams. “WHO NEEDS THE KEY?”

“THE BEETLES!” Asthma shouts. “GODDAMNIT, Pea Pod!”

“The ants make a paste,” Charter explains gently. “They roll it into little balls the size of peas and put it in a cabinet. The cabinet is locked. When the ants go to sleep, the Papesse sends her butler—”

“Not her butler, ” Asthma complains. “It can’t be her butler. It has to be her. . her. . I don’t know what!”

“You’re fast, Asthma,” Charter says. “He’s called the butler — and you’ll see why — but in fact he’s a footman, and like all beetles he has sticky feet. Once he’s snuck into the laboratory and opened the cabinet, he collects the balls of cinnabar with his sticky feet and then he carries them to the Papesse. Who has been waiting for him all night long impatiently. Because her color is fading and she needs him to—”

“WAX HER!” Asthma exults. “See? Pea Pod? WAX her all over!”

“Which is why he’s called ‘the butler,’” Charter interjects triumphantly. “It’s his way of dressing her. He’s also called: the Butterer. ”

“It’s not a story!” Pea Pod screams. “IT’S NOT A STORY! Let’s go to your room! Like Goldie said we were supposed to. ” She stomps off.

“I’m staying here with Brightfellow,” Asthma says, pressing a little square of pink bubble gum into the palm of his hand. “The Butterer. ” She smirks.

The philosophers warn us that our perceptions are not to be trusted, yet we must assume that the mother is soused when she slurs her consonants, that the child is making fudge when the heavy copper pot is brought out and set on the stove. And it is a fine thing when our perceptions pan out. As when Asthma appears at Billy’s door with that very fudge, still warm, and the next thing you know, you’re sitting on Blackie’s lawn between two little girls smelling of summertime, eating fudge with your fingers.

It is Saturday; the sound of ice tumbling from freezer trays shatters in the air. And here is Goldie, gin and tonic in hand, dressed to the nines, her face painted within every inch of its life, and with a plan for the rest of the afternoon. She will take us to town for a movie, the girls and I will have our supper at the soda fountain. (Cheers at all this.) After, Goldie will fetch us and bring us all home. She’s footing the bill, she assures me.

The impossible unfolds. We are in Goldie’s car. We are leaving the Circle, driving past the library, the empty classrooms, the outlying woods — and then the road is flanked for long minutes by trees — the clam shack, gas station, Annie’s next; the little houses painted white and green. The scarred place where my father’s house once stood. Farmland and then Hawkskill, its grocery, its five-and-dime, its bar, and the very heart of downtown. And we are walking into the Moonlight Theater. I am handing our tickets over to a boy who tears them apart. I am buying Tootsie Rolls, overseen by a brass sphinx and an eighth-grader in braids, then guiding the girls past a plaster obelisk carved with dismembered feet and hands, sacred ladders, pancakes, and birds. We are treading the Moonlight’s indigo carpet, a carpet swarming with putti and stained with root beer. Sitting at last in the blue shadows, the girls at each of my elbows, taking in a shimmering red curtain, watching it part like something melting away, watching the stars orbit the mountain, the rabbit chomp his carrot and evade death; watching Jimmy Stewart, his binoculars so like my own, his habits so familiar. I sit on my little velveteen upholstered chair, fully realized: a designated guardian of little girls! And here is the irresistible Jimmy Stewart immobilized by a broken leg, just as I’ve been immobilized by a broken whatever-it-was that was broken! My soul was it? My mind? I sit as happy as I believe I was intended to be, as the girls ferret in their pockets for Tootsie Rolls and Wax Lips without once looking away from the screen.

Later, over toasted cheese sandwiches and vanilla milkshakes, the girls discuss the movie. They both disapprove of Jimmy Stewart’s nipples—“men should not have nipples!” (Asthma); “no one should have nipples!” (Pea Pod). They wonder about the logistics of cutting up a body and taking it out the door one piece at a time. They suppose the thighs look like hams and that there would have only been room for two in the suitcase. They wonder if the knees would have been attached to the thighs. They think it unjust the dog was murdered. “It was not a whiner” (Pea Pod). “It was the wife that whined” (Asthma). She turns to me, says, “Jimmy Stewart reminds me of you.”

“But I don’t have nipples,” I manage.

“Looking out that window, stupid,” she says.

“We all do that,” I tell her. “That is what windows are for.” I make a strange noise in spite of myself, something like a frog being strangled.

“You do so have nipples!” Pea Pod says ragefully. “Everybody does! It doesn’t make any sense!” She decides.

“I like spying,” says Asthma.

“She spies on you!” cries Pea Pod, sloppily sucking foam from the bottom of her glass with a straw. And then, as the earth heaves under me, she adds: “She’s a peep peep, peep peep, peeping Tom” to the tune of “Sh-Boom.”

On the way home, Goldie, looking flushed and pawed over, asks Asthma what she wants to be when she grows up. Without hesitation she says:

“I want to be a pickpocket.”

“You are one hell of a tease,” says Goldie.

“I want to be a mermaid,” Pea Pod, wearing Wax Lips, whispers incomprehensibly.

“Asthma is speaking cryptically and symbolically,” I say, having regained my composure. “What she is saying is she wants to see the beauties of the world and live her life deeply.” Asthma snorts.

“Since when,” snarls Goldie, “do eight-year-olds need interpreters?”

The Époisses is pungent, it raises a stink. Charter holds his breath and takes a bite. It tastes of the forest floor, mushroom maybe, the underside of a rock. It’s fecund, impossibly rich, and it is good, astonishingly so when eaten with crusty bread and wine. There is also a Maroilles — equally fetid, outrageous, maybe even obscene, delicious. For the first time Charter tastes a Côtes du Rhône. This, he thinks, is the life.

The Époisses thickening his tongue, Billy mumbles: “Tell me more about the — what did you say they were called?”

Bloody hell. . the wine. The wine! Charter can no longer remember.

“The Mannja. . Mannja. .,” Billy struggles.

“The Mannja Fnadr.” Charter recalls it. “Let’s see; well: when it thunders — and it thunders often — they strike things together, things like bones or stones. This is done to remind the gods that they, too — the Mannja Fnadr — can make a noise. ”

“And when they die?”

“They say when it’s time to die, the gods pull them up to the sky by the neck with something like a fishhook.”

Billy roars with laughter. Charter joins him and for a moment they are both once again overcome with hilarity. But just as quickly Charter is sickened by this laughter. He feels he has betrayed — and how absurd this is! — these people, the Mannja Fnadr, whom he has invented! He thinks he must come up at once with a transcendent vision. He wants the Mannja Fnadr to impress Billy. He wants them to forgive him for his banalities, his facile mocking of their “savage” state!

“And the soul ?” Billy asks, as if reading his mind. “What do they say of the soul?”