Gutshot: Stories Read online

  * * *

  The girl slept up there each night, turning over every few hours. There would be no space for her to curl her legs up to her chest. One night, my partner left the bed and I heard him whispering to her in the bathroom. In the morning, we heard her noises change as she lifted her elbows and slid on her belly. My partner rolled atop me and said that the girl had begun to trust the surfaces she was coming to know. It was very exciting for him, which made it very exciting for me.

  He left for work and I opened and closed a cabinet for a while before putting on water for tea. I could hear the girl rumble above me in the kitchen. She said Could you let me out of here? I replied that the world which had been created for her was out of my control. She said it wasn’t true, that if I might call an authority, everything would be solved.

  An insolent silence followed. Pushing aside my desire to cut the duct open with one of the heavy steak knives and plunge the knife into her neck, I pointed out that she had made all the choices that brought her to that moment, that if she had been forced to do anything in her life, it had not been in our presence and we would not be held accountable. As I spoke, a drop landed on my shoulder. She confessed that she had wanted to be let out because she didn’t know where else to use the toilet. I took my tea into the living room, annoyed. She banged away for a while but eventually calmed down. A few hours passed and I cleaned the mess from where it had landed on the kitchen floor.

  From then on, she made waste in that area, directly over the stove. We couldn’t convince her otherwise, even though my partner did his best to startle her as she did it, pounding the duct with a broom handle. It must have been her small idea of insurrection. My partner shouted that she was lucky to be where she was, that the world was a terrifying place for anyone and particularly terrifying for a girl like her, and that when she toughened her softer skin and grew out some more of her body hair, she might understand her own strength and power. Eventually, without a word to me about it, he rigged up a tarp and bucket under the kitchen vent. And at night, they whispered.

  * * *

  We were sleeping late one morning when the girl began to knock above us. We tried to ignore her with some mutual masturbation but the knocking grew louder and she cried out without words. My partner got out of bed and left the room for some time. When he returned he spoke to her, saying he had opened the vent over the study and left his watch inside. She stopped knocking and slid away.

  It was his father’s watch, I knew. The man would drive his family cross-country every few months to observe the passing seasons. They watched leaves and local rock formations and various beaches, blissfully unaware of the part they were taking in the destruction of the very environment they enjoyed. He drank gas station coffee from Styrofoam cups and when he finished the coffee, he would bite into the cup itself, chewing it thoughtfully, usually consuming the whole thing before the next destination. On one of his later birthdays, he bought himself a fine watch and enjoyed it for a few years before he died. It was one of those things that my partner had long wanted to get rid of without knowing exactly why, along with his own graduation photos and a motorcycle helmet he had acquired from a friend.

  A scraping noise from the far side of the house meant that she had found the watch. I imagined her spreading her fistfuls of money in front of her, slipping the watch over her thin wrist, and tucking the cash into its silver band.

  That night, my partner waited until he heard my even breath and rolled from bed. I followed him and saw him unlatching the vent. He stepped in and replaced it so quietly I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t watched, clutching the doorframe.

  * * *

  In the morning, he brought me a slab of toast with fresh butter. I could hear her above the bathroom while I washed my hair. She remarked that she heard the water running and asked if she could come down for a quick scrub. I responded that we only used baking soda and white vinegar and that I could make her a cup to take in the duct if she liked. She declined but was polite about it. She had become sweeter to me as the days wore on. I suspected she had developed a plan of winning me over through feminine duplicity. As if to corroborate this theory, the girl made her period and a few drops fell onto the floor by the bed. Every room was replete with blood-bearing potential.

  While she was over the kitchen, I dragged the stepladder into the office and climbed up with a handful of radishes from the harvest box. I said that lunch was served if she could find it, that I had opened a window so we might have a little air. But I would not be fooled.

  * * *

  The girl created a method by which she could live with relative order. A few times a day, she would crawl into the standing-room area where she had first entered the system, finding the footholds and lowering herself. She could store her money and empty dishes there, or stand and stretch her legs. A clatter when she crawled suggested she was wearing the watch around her wrist or ankle. I listened for her while opening and closing the bathroom door, which stood next to the entry grate. My continued practice was growing strange; it was harder than ever to imagine what green grass would look like up close. My best image was of a stagnant field, like what one finds in an old pond, but even this image was fading along with my knowledge of ponds. The girl and I spoke less and less to each other.

  My partner arrived home with groceries and I put them away. I prepared dinner and climbed the stepladder to serve the girl after we had eaten our share. Playing her part in the order, she ate quickly and then crawled to store her dish. Each of us had our individual function and hers was to embody the house, which had begun to smell like a hot scalp.

  She had grown silent around me. I mentioned this to my partner while he was feeding me dessert. He spooned fat curds of cottage cheese into my mouth and said that it was only natural that the girl had become comfortable with her surroundings. He reminded me that I had not challenged the boundaries of my own life in many years, nor had he challenged his own. Even though we feel quite free, he remarked, every life has its surrounding wall. He wiped my chin with a napkin and kissed the napkin.

  The next morning, he was in the duct with her. He must have been watching me sleep from the vent above the bed because when I woke up, he requested I replace the screws and tighten them.

  He phoned the girl’s employer while I was sweeping up in the kitchen. Over my noise, I could hear her say that she had decided to quit. There was a silence. At first I stopped my movement and strained to hear, but there was nothing. I tried to forget the silence and my hatred of it, opening a cabinet to put away the clean dishes.

  In the back of the cabinet, over the plates, there was a portal through which I viewed the windless void of a new ecosystem. I could almost hear it breathing.

  The Lark

  William was a puker. His expulsions—the color, consistency, and volume of a baby’s—occurred after every sentence he spoke. This unfortunate fact of life began innocently enough during his infant coos and babbles, but by the time he was barfing onto his coloring books, the doctors were stumped. He had to carry a paper cup throughout middle school. By high school he didn’t have to worry about direct ridicule any longer, because he had no friends. And then everyone in his peer group graduated and left town and he was blessedly, blissfully alone.

  After William was done with school he took a job at the local post office, where customers tended to be enfeebled or insane and everyone had larger problems. He would spit up into an empty soda bottle. His coworkers assumed he chewed tobacco and gave him tins of it on his birthday.

  Each day at work, he stood at the counter and observed a large map of North America, which hung over the desk where folks filled out their change-of-address forms. Time passed and William began taking a daily visual interest in the Northwest Territories, which jutted down like a thumb holding Canada in its confident grasp. He imagined it as a pleasantly desolate place. On smoke breaks, he washed out his soda bottle in the bathroom sink.

  One day, a woman with a wind-chapped face approa
ched his desk. Her right arm was wrapped in a sterile bandage and she held a plastic cat carrier under her left. “What’s the lark,” she said.

  “Beg pardon?” William said, raising the bottle to his lips.

  She horked up a little something of her own. Her shoulders seemed to be coated with a thin paste. “What’s the lark, what is the lark,” she said.

  “The lark?”

  “The lark the lark,” she said, inserting a fingernail under the wrapped bandage to scratch a spot.

  “First-class stamps cost forty-nine cents apiece,” William said. He was halfway through the sentence before he was overcome and had to grip the countertop to complete it as the bile rose. “We have some with birds on them, but I’m not sure the skylark is featured.”

  She hefted the cat carrier onto the counter. It registered just over thirteen pounds on the metered scale. Inside the carrier, an orange tabby let out a low warning growl. William couldn’t see for certain, but it appeared as if the animal was missing all four of its legs.

  “The loork, the lark lark the lark lake lurk lark,” the woman said. She spoke with a reasonable cadence, as if she was asking about shipping rates to the Northwest Territories. William wondered briefly if perhaps she was indeed asking about shipping rates to the Northwest Territories and that his brain had transformed a reasonable question into the garble he now discerned, that he had finally lost his mind and would only hear phrases such as this until the merciful end. The cat rolled onto its side, moaning.

  “Rates really depend on what you’re sending,” he said. He spit into the bottle and pulled a kerchief from his pocket to wipe a pearly line of drool. “If you’re considering dispatching your cat, you should know that the only living thing that may be shipped via air transportation by the USPS is the queen honeybee, and that’s quite an expense indeed, particularly internationally.”

  He had never spoken so many words in an uninterrupted spurt. A coworker looked up from behind a stack of packages. For one wild moment, William was unaffected, but before he could truly appreciate that potential, he felt it welling. He gripped the counter for support, reaching blindly for the bin. His hand found an open box and he brought it to his face before the torrent unleashed.

  Customers stopped their talk to watch. His coworker covered her mouth with both hands. The material soaked the box and splashed back on his shirtfront. In it, he detected the odor of his mother’s warm milk. The lark woman brayed with laughter.

  William experienced the same absence of thought he always felt during the act. But because this episode lasted so much longer than usual, he found he could go further within it. He saw its bleak topography, an underwater mountain range, which revealed itself in waves of alternating anxiety and calm, the waves themselves muted and consumed. At the end, there was none of the clenched jaw and turning away that he usually felt. William realized his true freedom against the grip of time.

  He saw that his unwitting target had been a box of bulk postage and he now held hundreds, if not thousands, of ruined stamps, stuck to the cardboard and each other. The box was heavy and warming at a pace that matched his rising guilt at the destruction of federal property.

  The lark woman’s laugh calmed to a few odd snorts. She swayed, smiling. Everyone else remained shocked beyond movement. William and the woman leaned toward each other like an old couple over a kitchen table.

  “Have you ever been to Canada?” he asked.

  She nodded vigorously. When she saw he was about to be sick again, she reached for him. He had a vision of her hair matted by a corona of dark ice as he readied himself to fill her cupped hands.

  People of the Bay

  The poet brought his people to the bay and waved for them to quiet. When they did, he said, “Build our city with wood.”

  The people of the bay—for they were now people of the bay—took in a shared breath. “The wood will warp and split,” they said. “Our city quakes.” The ground rolled a little to confirm the fact.

  The poet parted the crowd to approach the loudest man, a worker who had raised his voice out of a professional concern. The poet clapped his hands on the man’s shoulders. “Raise high the cathedral walls with oak and pine,” said the poet. “Make a church that becomes an ark when turned.”

  And so the people built the city with wood they found in the flats nearby. They built palafittes and schoolhouses and shops and a great towering wooden sanctuary. Before they had even finished these projects, the wood had already begun to split as the builder had foretold.

  The poet arrived and regarded the project. He wrote something on a scroll and tucked it behind the piano, which had just been delivered on a boat. Once he was gone, the people dug out the scroll.

  “Load the ark with men and women and set it to sail,” someone read aloud. The people shrugged and placed the scroll back behind the piano. The earth quaked and rocked the piano, wedging it at an angle against the wall that rendered it unplayable.

  Walking down the narrow road, scrolls tucked under his arm, the poet looked more like a student heading to the classroom. He arrived at the waterside and observed the palafittes. “Paint our city in blue and yellow,” he said to the women setting up the bread for the morning. “Paint it to face the sun and sky, paint it to greet the bay.”

  The women set their mouths, but the poet remained, standing with his hands on his hips, until they took up brushes and buckets and began the slow task of painting the warping walls.

  “Paint the beams thick so that when the earth quakes it gets a mouthful of lead,” the poet called out. They shooed him away. The women slopped on another coat of paint and when it dried, they repeated the process, painting so thick that the houses lost their corners.

  When the poet reached the square, everyone gathered to listen. He cleared his throat and strutted haltingly across the sidewalk, looking rather like a fawn taking its first delicate steps. “Gird our quaking city with wooden beams,” he cried out, his sweet voice curling through the morning air.

  A murmur went up among them. “They won’t hold,” one said. “We’ll die in our beds,” shouted another. “You’ll kill us!”

  The poet threw back his head and looked at them one by one, his steady gaze conveying the fire in his heart. The people picked up their tools and obeyed. Underneath them all, the earth waited.

  On a Pleasant Afternoon, Every Battle Is Recalled

  A man should know how to butcher his own bird. Preparing my Sunday supper is a habit in which I take singular pleasure, a responsibility the women give me gladly. I sit through the last half hour of service tapping the hatters’ plush of my topper in anticipation of scraping pin feathers. And then home, where sweet Julia has laid out my chambray and apron, where the women have scrubbed and prepared the bucket and stool behind the kitchen and placed a cigar and a short bottle of rye by the fresh-killed bird. The weather is crisp and warming. The women of the White House kitchen grumble that it does not befit my station, but they learn that with power comes the ability to choose one’s own path.

  The idea for my Sunday ritual was Julia’s. She knew I missed the pleasures of war and felt muddled in my new position. One night, she had a memorable dream in which I was severing the feet from a fat hen. In the dream, the hen’s yellow claws pinched a scroll upon which were written the words ULYSSES GRANT, THE FINEST PRESIDENT. On waking, she rushed to my chamber and sat shivering at the foot of the bed while she told the tale. Her right eye crossed handsomely whenever her spirit was roused, and at that moment was so askew it appeared as if one eye watched the antechamber for an intruder as the other fixed upon me. I was reminded of the day I first met her, after service, her arms laden with stemmed dandelion flowers she had pulled from a patch beside the road. I said How do you do, and an errant bee stung her sweet armflesh and she dropped the weeds, screeching, wild eyes skewed, a devil woman before me, and I knew I would make her mine.

  What measures can a man take to ensure control over his own experience? It was a question I oft
en pondered on behalf of the soldiers under my watch. On behalf of them, to be clear, because they themselves were so filthy in the fields of Vicksburg and Appomattox that it was as if the sludge had entered their brains through the ears. I would treat them to fried oysters for breakfast and fresh coffee without the cut of chicory. We were all easily pleased in those days, and though there was no liquor I count that time among the happiest of my life.

  I cut my cigar with the beak knife and twist off the bird’s head. Its crop follows, stuffed with feed, and the gizzard, which I baptize with a splash of rye. The neck is reserved for broth. The oil gland slides free with a flick of the blade. I sing old battle songs while I work: one of a vacant chair by the fireside, another of the glory of emancipation. The viscera fall from the slit pouch, my empty bottle is replaced. The bird’s heart, the size of my thumb, is reserved for the cats.

  Satisfied with the process, I alert the women to the pile and take my leave to dress for supper. The window from my chamber affords a view of the new trees propped up with gardener’s stakes on the lawn. I drag over a chair and enjoy a fresh glass as the sun shines over my property, my territory, my nation. By the time the meal arrives, the bird and I barely recognize each other.

  Monument

  The townspeople met at the graveyard at the agreed-upon time. They brought bottles of vinegar for the weeds and pails of water and rags and soaps. A gardener hauled in a truck bed of hardy plants, one lady had flowers tucked in a laundry basket, and a few of the men brought shovels to even out the earth around the yard’s only tree. Someone started up a lawnmower.