Notes Toward The Story and other stories Read online

  “No, Robert,” she said, quietly. But she knew it was too late to protest. It was years too late.

  Robert walked toward his wife. He hit her once with the back of his hand. Effie put a hand to her cheek but otherwise did not move. She did not raise her hands to protect herself.

  “Who?” Robert said, raising the weapon. “Who?”

  Effie looked up at him. What did it matter,? she said in her head.

  “Who?” Robert said, and swung the mace, once, half-heartedly. It met the side of Effie’s head with a dull sound and she was deafened. There was a roar inside her. It was her blood answering her attacker.

  Effie was not sure quite what happened next. Suddenly a darkness crossed their kitchen window, a strong, angry cloud. She did not hear the back door wrenched open. Suddenly Robert was not standing in front of her any longer. Blood ran into Effie’s eyes.

  Robert was not standing in front of her any longer. The monster had picked him up and thrown him out the back door. The monster had then gone out into the yard for a few minutes, maybe two or three. Effie sat in the chair. Her hand was caressing her sore cheek, her fingers now coated in blood. She did not know what was happening. She was dizzy. She was perhaps hallucinating.

  The monster returned and lifted Effie. He gently swung her over his shoulder. As they exited the house the monster stepped over Robert, lying at the bottom of the steps, mired in mud and blood. Robert had landed on the cheap lawn sprinkler and now it bent around his head like a cracked headset. It looked comic and cheerless. Robert watched the monster carry his wife away but Robert could not move. Broken bones were involved. Robert watched the monster take his wife into the woods. They disappeared into the darkness of the woods as if they had walked through a door into another dimension.

  “Fuck,” Robert said, right before he passed out.

  Slung over the monster’s shoulder Effie was surprisingly calm. She thought about an expression she had heard, something about the devil you know versus the devil you do not. She didn’t want to know the devil she knew anymore.

  Effie had no idea how long she rode that great bony shoulder. She may have swooned, or dozed. It seemed as if they had travelled miles. She did not know the wooded area near her home was so deep, so dark, so tangled, and spackled with only tiny spears of sunlight. The monster moved swiftly but smoothly. Effie felt as if she were gliding, flying.

  On they went. For miles they went.

  Effie let her hands, which dangled over the creature’s back, feel the muscular landscape beneath its matted fur. He was a powerful animal.

  Some time later, an hour, a day, the monster stopped. The groundcover was thick and extraordinary. Effie thought she couldn’t possibly be in the woods near her home, the plain, kudzuey, Southern woods she had grown up with. All around her was a lush explosion of greenery, thick and twisted and strange. It was a nightmare’s forest, a place of florid black- magic, except that Effie was calm, was unafraid.

  The monster had stopped near the base of an enormous tree, an oak perhaps. Effie wished she knew plant life. The tree was thick and covered with gnarly, shaggy vines, thick vines that wound around the trunk like constrictors. The beast readjusted Effie on his shoulder. His strong hand on her back felt reassuring, even affectionate. Effie thought she might swoon again.

  Then as sudden as the crack of a rifle the monster grasped a vine and began to move upward at an expeditious clip. He was carrying Effie into the trees. They rose like a column of smoke, swiftly and smoothly into the darkness near the top. The leaves, damp with nature, slid across Effie’s cheeks and arms. She felt bedewed, refreshed. And still up they went. It got darker.

  Until they came to a stopping point. The monster set her down. She was standing on a plank floor. She was standing on a solid oak plank floor. Her eyes widened in amazement. Above her she could see tree-top, the sun a dappling brightness through the arabesque of foliage. She was on the porch of a house, a house built in the trees. It was small but beautifully made. Everything, door to hinge, boards to logs, window to wall, was finely connected. It was gorgeous. Effie tentatively stepped inside. There was an actual door! The monster moved backwards, slowly, cautiously. He was afraid to let her see.

  She stood in the middle of the room, amid rugs and handmade furniture and oil lamps and cooking stove and bookshelves (bookshelves!), and she was positively dizzy with what she was witnessing. She turned her wide-eyed wonder toward the monster. She smiled encouragement. Finally, she found her voice.

  “Did you, did you build this?” Effie asked, tentatively, as if speaking to a child. “I’m sorry, can you understand me?”

  “Yes,” the monster said. He cleared his jumbo throat. “I understand you. Though I am out of practice conversing.”

  “You—you,” Effie didn’t know what she wanted to say. “You—saved me.”

  “Mm,” the monster said. “He seemed a very bad man.”

  “He’s an awful man, yes,” Effie said, and suddenly felt shy before this creature, so colossal and strong and exotic.

  “I hurt him,” the monster said.

  “Yes,” Effie said and she smiled sweetly at him.

  “I don’t understand,” Effie said, after a while. “You talk, you build, you—you read! Where did you come from?”

  The monster looked sad. He put a large hand on a globe and spun it absentmindedly.

  “I’m sorry,” Effie said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Sit,” the monster said.

  Effie sat on the couch, her legs drawn beneath her.

  The monster also sat on the couch. His hair was thick like a cross between a boar’s and an orangutan’s. And it smelled slightly like wet leather, or creosote, a musky but not unpleasant funk.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name,” Effie said. “Mine is Effie.”

  “Effie,” he said. And for a second she thought he meant it was his name, too.

  “I am called, was called, Genet.”

  Now it was Effie’s turn to repeat. “Genet.” She said it softly the way one might pronounce the name of a magical place, a new Eden.

  In the days that followed Genet and Effie became closer. She could cook some things he could not. He brought her squirrels and possums and snakes. She improvised meals that pleased them both. Gradually a warmth grew between them. Effie almost forgot about her life down below. She was enchanted, captivated if not captured.

  Some nights they sat on the couch holding hands and talking about their past lives. Effie still never understood where Genet had come from. He would only speak about it in vague terms as if it had passed away into myth, like Atlantis. He seemed lost, out of his element. He had taken to eating trash. Was he a victim like her?

  And as they grew closer it was inevitable that they should finally share one bed. Effie had often been nude in front of her host (there was little privacy in their small quarters), but nothing sexual had arisen from it. But on this night, as if by mutual agreement, they ended up in the same bed. Genet was modest, reticent. He told her he had not been with a woman in over ten years. Where had he lived then,? Effie wondered. Effie wondered if he meant a human woman like her. Effie allowed she was pretty sexually pent- up herself.

  They lay under the thin cotton sheet for a while. Effie’s nakedness was stimulating her giant friend. He seemed impatient now, and a low growl rumbled through him.

  “Genet,” she whispered in his ear.

  “I’m not a monster,” Genet said. “I am just a very ugly man.”

  And, at that moment, I wish I could tell you that Effie found him beautiful, but it was not so. He was hideous, as ugly as a devil born of mud.

  But it didn’t matter. She reached down and felt for his pizzle. It was already erect and as big and thick as a horse’s. My stars, she thought, if Tammy could see me now. And right before she mounted the monster Effie wondered if she had put in her diaphragm. But then, in an incandescent flash of epiphany and joy and optimism and presc
ience, she thought to herself, it does not matter. He is my one lover now.

  Killer

  My dog’s name is Killer, but, really, it was meant ironically. We named him that when a pup. He’s a spitz/Akita mix, a funny- looking dog, built like a small bull. He weighs about fifty-five55 pounds and is all muscle.

  He slipped the leash. That’s what happened. The next thing I knew he was in someone’s yard and going crazy. It was too dark for me to see properly what he was after, but I found him in the hedge, with an orange cat pinned in the corner. Killer was fierce—I’d never seen him like that—and the cat was hissing like a cat in the wild.

  The guy came onto his porch to see what the din was—it was an unnaturally warm night for January—and he immediately began to swear at Killer and try to shoo him away, keeping his distance, I have to laugh. I began to apologize profusely, while trying to grab Killer by the scruff of his neck, but he was too strong.

  The cat made a run for it, disappearing into a narrow vent under the house. And damned if Killer didn’t go right in after it. I didn’t think he’d fit—that would be his comeuppance, getting his ass stuck under there. The owner of the cat was standing beside me now—in a Tt-shirt and pajama bottoms—and his expression was grim. He was teetering between being neighborly and getting on his high horse. I know the type.

  We could hear the animals under there—the sounds were almost unearthly, what a ruckus. I could make out Killer’s snarling exhalations—either he was stuck under the plumbing, or he’d gotten the cat cornered.

  I looked at the cat’s owner and said, “I’m sorry about this.”

  “Things happen,” he said, not meeting my eyes.

  Fuck him.

  Then there was the voice of a child coming from the guy’s backyard. I think the cat had slipped out a narrow vent on the far side.

  “She’s okay,” the kid yelled.

  “Well, good,” I said to the guy, who now was running his hand through his uncombed hair. Like he had the weight of the world on him.

  “All’s well that ends well, ay?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he offered. Then, as an afterthought, he stuck out his hand. I shook it.

  “Your dog,” he said.

  I don’t know whether it was concern or remonstration he was after because just then Killer came skulking out from under the house. He hunkered down to get through the opening.

  “There he is,” I said, and then to pacify the homeowner, “You nasty boy.”

  I leashed him and smiled at the guy. He smiled back and gave me a half-hearted one- hand salute.

  I waved back.

  Killer and I walked home in the dark. Killer wasn’t pulling on the leash anymore the way he does at the start of every walk. He seemed worn-out or perhaps satisfied in some canine way.

  When we got back home my wife, Karina, was watching Friends. She half-turned toward us.

  “Good walk?” she said.

  I wanted to whip her with the leash such was my rage at her indifference. I wanted to demand—I don’t know what. Wasted emotions, my shrink calls them.

  In the kitchen I got Killer a Milk-Bone. He took it as his due.

  I sat on the floor and wrestled him forcefully, holding his ruff. He growled, play-acting; it was part of our relationship. I let out a long sigh, one that had begun to build in me at that asshole’s house.

  It was then that I noticed the blood around Killer’s mouth. A smart red smudge like an eloquent flame.

  Jim Cherry

  in the Otherworld

  "MeetLead me, Jesus, meetlead me.

  Oh, won't you meetlead me in the middle of the air.

  And if my wings should fail me

  Won't you provide me with another pair."

  -Traditional, from "Bury My Body"

  On the second day, when Jim Cherry's chest pains continued, he began to contemplate his own mortality.

  Not that Jim hadn't thought about death before; in fact, thoughts of death were Jim's comrades, his familiars. He had always felt fragile, insubstantial, as ethereal as a soap bubble. It was the consequence, he believed, of reading too many depressing novels in those formative years, the early twenties.

  Now, here he was, forty-two42, married, and with two small children. It was marriage, fatherhood, which saved Jim from a life spent in contemplation of his own navel, so to speak, a life of self -absorption and egocentric anxiety. He had "grown up," as his wife, Sharilyn, told him. He had quieted his "inner child."

  And it was true, distaste for this kind of self-help psycho-babble aside. Jim Cherry was a man, if not exactly whole (how many of us are?), then at a sort of cease-fire stage with his demons. Formerly overwrought, even on the best of days, he now had times of mental leisure and happiness, times spent enjoying the nearby burble and whir of his children at play, content to laze in the La-Zzy-Bboy while his family ebbed and flowed around him. This was a good time for Jim and he knew it, and by knowing it compounded his sense of ease.

  That morning, he called his wife from the travel agency where he worked, with a slight feeling of foreboding, but nothing, he felt, which would disrupt the stream of everydayness.

  "What's up," Jim began, with a frail buoyancy. Something like dyspepsia pinged beneath his sternum.

  "I talked to Japan this morning. Japan. I am still of an age to marvel at that," Sharilyn said. Sharilyn worked for a small publisher of children's books and, in her daily routine, used faxes, e-mail, and the Iinternet, but technology constantly remained a source of wonder to her.

  "I talked to Jackie," Jim deadpanned. "Just like that. Just opened up and spoke to him. How about that?"

  "Go ahead. Be sportive."

  "I don't feel right," Jim now said.

  "What do you mean, right?"

  "Funny."

  "You don't feel funny? You're funny enough."

  "No, I feel funny. Not right. Maybe a pain in my chest."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah. A slight pain. Gas maybe?"

  "Probably. Do you think you ought to go to the emergency room?"

  "Nah. Gas probably. I got some stuff to do here."

  "You sure?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, call me back if it gets worse. Call me back anyway."

  "All right. Go talk to Somalia or some place. Where's Somalia?"

  "I don't know. Love you."

  When Jim got home that night neither he nor Sharilyn mentioned the pain in Jim's chest. Sharilyn put it down to more hypochondria, more unnecessary worry. After all, she had endured years of Jim's neurotic responses to the world.

  About eight o'clock Jim's chest pain was slightly more pronounced and he brought it up again.

  "Jim, maybe you ought to go have it checked out. They say not to mess around with chest pain."

  "Yeah, I know. Maybe I'll just go to the minor emergency clinic."

  "You had such a bad experience there last time."

  "I know. What's the chances of getting that quack again?"

  "Pretty good, I'd say."

  "Nah, I'll just go there. It's right around the corner."

  Nathan, their six- year- old, tumbled in just then.

  "Where you going, Pop?"

  "Just up to the doctor. Nothing to worry about."

  Jim drove himself to the clinic with some trembling in his limbs. He hated these "Doc in a Box" places, with their peremptory approach to care.

  The doctor there that evening was indeed the same one as before. His misdiagnosis of an infection had led to some hospital time.

  "What's the problem, Mr. Cherry?" the runty, pompous physician said as he swept into the examining room.

  "Just some minor chest pains.” Jim managed a tight smile.

  "No such thing. You're gonna have to go to the emergency room. I'm not equipped to handle chest pain here."

  "Just like that?"

  "Yep. Jim, I can examine you and run you through some tests, bill you for it, but in the end I'm gonna send you to the hospital. Your choice."


  "Well, hell. I'll just go."

  "Right, I'll take your name off the books here."

  Jim sat in his car and fretted. He didn't want to go to the emergency room. He wanted to go home and kiss his kids good night and get in bed with his willowy wife and read his James Cain novel and sleep on his own pillow. But, knowing himself, knowing his worry would escalate, he drove the mile or so to the midtown emergency room and parked his car in the pay lot.

  From a phone just inside the door he called Sharilyn.

  "They sent me to the emergency room."

  "Jim. Why did they do that?"

  "Oh, it was that little jerk again. He couldn't take the responsibility so he passed on me. It's all save my own ass in the medical field. Anyway, here I am. I'm fixing to get probed."

  "You want me to come down? I can get Ruth to pop over and stay with the kids."

  "Nah. I'll be here a while, I'm sure. I'll call you."

  But Jim made it through the labyrinth of hospital procedure surprisingly quickly, and rather than an overnight stay, which Jim had anticipated as a matter of course, he was released a few hours later, with the assuagement of a diagnosis of pleurisy.

  Still, Jim was alarmed by the evening's disarray, and did not trust, that, just like that, he was back among the unscathed, the sturdy.

  Sharilyn was reading in bed when Jim got home. The house was as still as a moored ship, and this was Jim's favorite time of day, when the children were safe in bed and the house was quiet and he and Sharilyn were chatting about the day's particulars, about the books they were reading, about the tiny progressions their kids were making in their voyages out into the world. It was a time of peace and reassurance.

  "Whad they say?" she asked immediately.

  "Pleurisy.” Jim smiled.

  "Well. Thank God."

  "Yeah."

  "What do you do for that?"

  "Take souped-up Midol apparently."

  "Well, that's a relief."

  "Yes."

  "I'm glad you're home. I thought for sure they'd keep you overnight."

  "Me too, both things. Man, they respond quickly when you use the phrase 'chest pains.' They don't mess around."

  "I'm glad."

  "Yes. Kids okay? Angie's scrape healing up?"

  "Yeah. Katy said she talked about it all day, though. Sort of a trauma and a badge of honor simultaneously."