Christopher Kloeble - Almost Everything Very Fast

Fred paused beside a garden fence, stretched his arm over the wire, and waited. A white-and-brown-mottled foal broke from the shadow of an arborvitae hedge, trotted closer, and lifted its head so that Fred could stroke it between the ears. Albert watched as Fred tickled it, said hello, and asked how its day was going. He got the impression it enjoyed Fred’s company — it whinnied, as if at any moment it might break out into unceremonious chatter.

Fred waved him closer. “Gertrude? This is Albert.”

“Gertrude?” Albert took a step toward them, and the horse flinched.

“It’s okay,” Fred said to the foal, which was holding itself just out of reach. Albert wasn’t surprised; he tended to have this sort of effect on animals. Presumably they were able to sense that he still couldn’t grasp why most people had more pity for a stray cat than for a vagrant on the subway.

Albert cleared his throat. “Let’s get going.”

“Can’t we stay for a minute?”

“No.”

“But Gertrude—”

“No!” said Albert, louder than he’d intended. He really wasn’t in the mood for a petting zoo.

Fred pulled him aside. “When I’m dead, you have to come see Gertrude every day,” he whispered.

Albert hadn’t expected that; wiping the sweat from his forehead, he said, “I’m not good at these things.”

Fred clapped him on the shoulder. “It won’t take you long to learn.”

Then he said his good-byes to the foal. Fred had never mentioned Gertrude after returning from his rambles through Königsdorf, thought Albert; and if Fred didn’t mention something, it usually meant he’d been up to no good.

Fred interrupted Albert’s train of thought when he came to a halt in the middle of the street. “We’re there.”

Albert glanced around. Farm plots stretched away on either side. The sun stung them. Flies traced rectangles above dried cow dung.

Fred drew a crowbar from his backpack, kneeled, and began struggling to slip its end under the manhole cover.

“What are you doing? Stop it!” shouted Albert.

Fred turned to look at him, and with an aggrieved bass note the cover slid back into its recess. “We have to go down there.”

“What if someone sees us? What if a car comes along?”

Fred glanced at both ends of the street. “There’s no car coming.”

“Look, that’s not the point. We can’t just climb down into the sewer.”

“Why?”

“Because …” Albert thought for a moment. “Because it isn’t allowed.” He took the crowbar from Fred. “And you should ask me before you play around with something like that. You could hurt yourself.”

“But you told me I have to show you where the gold comes from!”

“From down there?”

Frenzied nodding of the head. “Can I have the crowbar?”

Albert pointed to the manhole cover. “Seriously — down there? ”

“I need the crowbar now,” said Fred.

“Isn’t there any other way?”

With a single motion Fred was up on his feet, towering over Albert, grabbing the hand in which he held the bar. At first, Albert didn’t feel anything, he tried to pull his hand away, but it was held fast, and he struggled in vain to loosen Fred’s grip with the other. “Let. Go.” The pressure increased, it felt as if Fred were driving Albert’s fingers right into the crowbar’s iron. Fred’s hat had slid forward, hiding his eyes, his lips silently opened and closed. The pain fused with a numbness that wandered up along Albert’s arm. Just before it reached his elbow, he pushed himself backward with all his strength. “Fred, stop it!” he shouted, and Fred finally let go. Albert stumbled backward. The crowbar landed next to his feet.

Albert picked up his tote bag and walked away.

Beside Gertrude’s fence he examined his now dark-red hand, wiggling one finger after another. They didn’t seem to be broken. “The joke of it,” he shouted to the foal, “is that I worry about his health.”

Gertrude actually neighed.

At age six, Albert had once called Fred a retard because he’d broken his He-Man figure while attempting to turn him back into Prince Adam. In response, Fred had aimed a kick at Albert and broken two of the latter’s toes. While pretending to box, Fred had inadvertently given him plenty of shiners. Albert’s body was long accustomed to little wounds and bruises.

Gertrude snuffled in the direction of his hand, which he was extending over the fence.

“What now?”

A glider was circling in the sky above them, making the usual glider noises, sounding like summer. Albert glanced around to see if Fred was following him. With his undamaged hand he lit a cigarette. Gertrude cropped with her teeth at a tuft of grass. Albert was hot — he pulled off the raincoat, tangling himself up in the process. The plastic didn’t want to let him go. He tossed it away into one of the plots. For a while he stood doubtful in the street, trembling. He knew that, left on his own, Fred wouldn’t budge from the spot. Once he’d spent two whole days sitting in the BMW without any food because of some fight that Albert could no longer remember the reason for, and who knows how long he would have kept waiting if Albert hadn’t eventually given in. Fred was at least as stubborn as Albert, and precisely because he knew he had to go back and get him, he didn’t want to. He flicked his cigarette to the curb.

Now Fred had managed to make Albert feel like a child.

The asphalt’s heat drilled up through the soles of his shoes.

Albert sat down in the shadow of Gertrude’s fence, closed his eyes, and imagined that Fred would come for him, just this once, that Fred would come and apologize, that they’d talk everything out, and laugh about it, and clap each other on the shoulders.

He was nineteen years old now, but as far as his wishes were concerned he still felt just like the three-year-old who’d stood on the steps of Saint Helena, arms defiantly crossed, refusing to set foot in his new home. Who’d countered all of Sister Alfonsa’s rigorous pleading with “Bert won’t.” Whose granny — fully half of his known family — had just died. A stubborn child who’d spent his first night at the orphanage in front of the orphanage, curled up on a doormat stamped with the word AMEN. Who’d been woken early in the morning by the tolling of the bells, and had immediately realized that Sister Alfonsa had spent the whole night there with him, just behind the door in the entrance hall. Who’d suddenly felt a tremendous hunger, and followed this new ersatz family member into the kitchen, where he’d been allowed to dunk a few rock-hard dinner rolls from the previous day into honeyed milk. A child who stopped calling himself Bert only when Sister Alfonsa threatened him with five hundred shoe tyings. A child whose mental capacities had not only earned him chess lessons but also allowed him to write, at age four and a half, in one of Fred’s encyclopedias, when the latter, during a picnic, was weeping over Anni’s death: Downt be saad. Who, while playing cops-and-robbers in the woods, for which purpose the orphans armed themselves with darts that they’d fling every which way with no restraint whatsoever, had incurred a scar the length of a matchstick at the left-hand corner of his mouth, a scar that could transform itself in the blink of an eye into a laugh line. And the only child in Saint Helena with a father who couldn’t be a father, in contrast to the many parents who didn’t want to be.

Thumper

When Albert came back, Fred was standing in exactly the same spot where he’d left him. Beside him was Tobi, a man of Albert’s age, who was seldom seen standing still. One couldn’t call what he did moving , exactly — it was more of a wriggling mated with a shuffling. The reeling of a land rat who suddenly finds himself shipboard.