American Morons Read online

  Selkirk stood up. “But you said—”

  “He’d lost his hat. And his coat had come open. He crawled right up the beach, sidewise, like a crab. Just the way he had down the rigging. Of course, my arms opened to him, and the cold dove down my dress. I was laughing, Mr. Selkirk. Weeping and laughing and cooing, and his head swung up, and I saw.”

  With a single, determined wriggle of her shoulders, Mrs. Marchant went completely still. She didn’t speak again for several minutes. Helpless, Selkirk sat back down.

  “The only question I had in the end, Mr. Selkirk, was when it had happened.”

  For no reason he could name, Selkirk experienced a flash of Amalia’s cruel, haunted face, and tried for the thousandth time to imagine where she’d gone. Then he thought of the dead town behind him, the debris disappearing piece by piece and bone by bone into the dunes, his aunt’s silent death. His uncle. He’d never made any effort to determine what had happened to his uncle after Amalia vanished.

  “I still think about the Kendall boys, you know,” Mrs. Marchant murmured. “Every day. The one suspended in the ropes, exposed like that, all torn up. And the one that disappeared. Do you think he jumped to get away, Mr. Selkirk? I think he might have. I would have.”

  “What on earth are you—”

  “Even the dead’s eyes reflect light,” she said, turning her bright and living ones on him. “Did you know that? But Charlie’s eyes…Of course, it wasn’t really Charlie anymore, but…”

  Selkirk almost leapt to his feet again, wanted to, wished he could hurtle downstairs, flee into the dusk. “What do you mean?”

  For answer, Mrs. Marchant cocked her head at him, and a wisp of a smile hovered over her mouth and evaporated. “What do I mean? How do I know? Was it a ghost? Do you know how many hundreds of sailors have died within five miles of this point? Surely one or two of them might have been angry about it.”

  “Are you actually saying—”

  “Or maybe that’s silly. Maybe it was the sea. Something that lives in it. I can’t tell you. What I can tell you is that there was no Charlie in the face before me, Mr. Selkirk. None. I had no doubt. No question. My only hope was that whatever it was had come for him after he was already gone, the way a hermit crab climbs inside a shell. Please God, if there is such a creature, let it be the wind and the cold that took my husband.”

  Staggering upright, Selkirk shook his head. “You said he was dead.”

  “So he was.”

  “You were mistaken.”

  “It killed the Kendall boy, Mr. Selkirk. It crawled down and tore him to shreds. I’m fairly certain it killed its own father as well. Charlie’s father, I mean. Luis took one look at him and vanished into the dunes. I never saw the dog again.”

  “Of course it was him. You’re not yourself, Mrs. Marchant. All these years alone…It spared you, didn’t it? Didn’t he?”

  Mrs. Marchant smiled one more time and broke down weeping, silently. “It had just eaten,” she whispered. “Or whatever it is it does. Or maybe I had just lost my last loved ones, and stank of the saltwater, had no heat left in my body, and it thought I was like it. One of it.”

  “Listen,” Selkirk said, and on impulse he dropped to one knee and took her hands once more. God, but they were cold. So many years in this cold, with this weight on her shoulders. “That day was so full of tragedy. Whatever you think you…”

  Very slowly, Selkirk stopped. His mind retreated down the stairs, out the lighthouse door to the mainland, over the disappearing path he’d walked between the dunes, and all the way back into Winsett. He saw anew the shuttered boarding houses and empty taverns. He saw the street where his uncle’s cabin had been. What had happened to his uncle? His aunt? Amalia? Where had they gone? Just how long had it taken Winsett to die? His mind scrambled farther out of town, up the track he had taken, between the discarded pans and decaying whale bones toward the other silent, deserted towns all along this blasted section of the Cape. Where were all these people?

  “Mrs. Marchant,” he whispered, his hands tightening around hers, having finally understood why she had shut herself up in this tower. What she thought was happening out there. “Mrs. Marchant, please. Where is Charlie now?”

  She stood, then, and twined one gentle finger through the tops of his curls as she wiped at her tears. The gesture felt dispassionate, almost maternal, something a mother might do to a son who has just awoken. He looked up and found her gazing again, not out to sea but over the dunes at the dark streaming inland. Had she actually seen him since? Seen it? Prowling the dunes like a wolf, with bones in its mouth….

  “It’s going to get even colder,” she said. “I’ll put the kettle on.”

  Transitway

  “Is there any need to explain why

  fear eats the soul of Los Angeles?”

  Mike Davis

  On the first day of his retirement, Ferdinand Fernandez awoke to banging on his front door. For a few, fuzzy moments, the sound bewildered him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually heard it. Rolling over, he dropped his hand onto the empty pillow beside him, momentarily wondered at the ghost of heat he imagined he felt there, then forgot it as whoever was outside banged again.

  “Coming,” Ferdinand mumbled, digging into the pile of clean but unfolded Hawaiian shirts he never bothered to return to his single chest of drawers. The one he pulled up was mostly blue, with swordfish leaping across it. Struggling into that and a pair of shorts, he stood up barefoot on his futon, feeling his gut drop onto his hipbones like some exhausted geriatric leaning over a seawall, and caught sight of the clock.

  10:30.

  The panic that seized him wasn’t entirely surprising. He’d felt it buzzing around in his dreams all night. And it had probably been thirty years since he’d slept this long. This time, the banging on the door rattled his living room clock off the wall.

  “Goddammit,” Ferdinand barked, though half-heartedly. As he stepped across the warped hardwood floor of his bungalow in his bare feet, he decided it wouldn’t be the worst thing to see another human being’s face this morning. Any human being’s. After all, today—and pretty much every day, from now on—there would be no one, anywhere, waiting for him.

  Throwing open the door, he blinked against the blinding L.A. sunlight, and Q shoved him backward and strolled in, brandishing a black satchel. His shined two-toned shoes clopped, as though they had taps attached. Knowing Q, Ferdinand thought, they just might.

  “Out the way, freed slave coming through,” Q said, bounding straight across the living room, through the kitchen toward the unused back hallway and the bungalow’s other room.

  For the second time that morning, panic flared in Ferdinand’s chest. “Where the hell are you going?”

  At the sound of his voice, Q stopped dead, one foot still in the kitchen, the other poised above the scraggly tan carpeting of the hall. When he turned around, he was wearing the surprised smile that had, all by itself, made him a better teacher than Ferdinand, and an exceptionally long-lived department chair. There was something endearing about someone so completely in charge being that willing, and that often, to be caught off guard.

  “No idea,” he said. “Seems like last time I was here, we…”

  “Last time?” Ferdinand blinked, rubbed at the sleep in his eyes and wound up smearing sweat there instead. “When was that, exactly?”

  By now, Q had recovered, become Q again. “Right ‘round the last time you invited me, F-Squared.”

  Ferdinand winced, although he knew Q hadn’t meant any insult. The nickname had been pasted to him by a recent class of students, and was a term of affectionate mockery since, other than P.E., his courses had become probably the hardest to fail in all of Florence-Normandie High School. He hadn’t meant to go soft. He’d just lost the point, somewhere, of telling these particular kids, facing their particular choices, that they sucked at communicating.

  For a long breath, the two men stared at each other. Outside, the
air Q had disturbed filled again with its more familiar sound: the gush and snarl of traffic pouring over the 110 freeway just down the block like the morning tide. Ferdinand eyed his boss—ex-boss—and felt a surge of startling and powerful gratitude. For thirty-four years, going to work had been better than it might have been because he got to spend at least twenty or so minutes of his time each day with this man.

  Except that looking at Q now, it seemed Ferdinand hadn’t really seen him for years. When, exactly, had Q gotten old? Well into his fifties, Q had kept his ‘fro flying—”Springy as a trampoline, soft as your butt”—but sometime recently he’d shaved it down, and now all he had atop his knobby black skull were outcroppings of charcoal fuzz, like dead moss on a boulder. What had been Q’s barrel chest was now a barrel all the way to his hips, and it swung when he walked.

  “What?” Q snapped.

  Ferdinand gestured at the black satchel. “That’s your idea for our first day of retirement? Bowling?”

  Q unzipped the satchel with a flourish, then drew out the strobe ball that had hung over his desk for three decades. He laid that on Ferdinand’s white, round, plastic kitchen table, then pulled out eight bottles of Corona and set those ceremoniously next to the ball before flinging the bag away.

  “‘Not your real uncle, praise the Lord,’” Ferdinand murmured, then blinked as Q straightened up, mouth flat.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” Ferdinand’s breath felt furry and uncomfortable in his mouth. From too much sleep, perhaps. “Didn’t I used to say that to you? Or some student?”

  Q shrugged, settled back into his habitual, hip-cocked, preening posture. “Well, I ain’t your uncle. I’m your daddy.” And he waved at the beer and the strobe. “You imagine how boring this year’s end-of-term wine-and-whine faculty meeting’s going to be without me and my stuff?”

  “I’m still trying to get over how boring they were with your stuff.”

  Q grinned. “What’s for breakfast, fellow free man?”

  While Ferdinand got bowls down from his cabinet for cereal, Q wandered again toward the hallway that led to the back room. It made Ferdinand nervous. God, when was the last time even he’d been back there? Guest room, that’s what he’d called it. Hadn’t he? Stupid conceit. By the time he’d finally managed to save enough, scraps from twenty-six years of teaching paychecks to put a down payment on this place, his parents had been long dead, and his sisters had moved to Fullerton with their families, which was just far enough away for them to visit less often, but not far enough for them to sleep over. Except for Q, his school colleagues had stayed colleagues, not friends, and if Q ever did sleep over, it would be face down wherever the last Corona had left him, not in a bed. Right this second, Ferdinand couldn’t even remember if there was a bed in that room. Whatever furniture there was in there, the termites and dust must have long since claimed it.

  Pouring oat bran and milk into the bowls, Ferdinand let his eyes close for just a moment. People had warned him about the first hours of retirement. He’d told them they were crazy, it wouldn’t be like that for him. From outside, sluicing through walls honeycombed with termite nests he couldn’t afford to eradicate, came the gush of freeway noise. There should have been other sounds out there, too. Had been, once. The blatt and thud from some souped-up ride stereo, say, or the sound of neighborhood kids woofing at each other’s sisters. But his neighborhood had gone silent of late. Or else the freeway had overflowed its banks and drowned out everything else.

  He turned, and Q scowled.

  “What is that? Bran? I bring you my strobe, you offer me fiber?” Sweeping both bowls out of Ferdinand’s hands, Q flipped them upside down into the sink. “Where the eggs?”

  He didn’t wait for Ferdinand to point to the refrigerator before popping it open. “Good. Where the peppers? You people always have peppers.” He found those, too, piled in the vegetable drawer. “Okey-dokey. Now. Dance.”

  And all at once, Ferdinand realized it was all true. There would be no more Back-to-School night. No more “Wait, you teach English?” No more beautiful, still-hopeful faces disappearing mid-semester into their South Central lives and never coming back. No more F-Squared. No more no-flip-flops days. Dropping into a pose he could only hope was as gleeful as he felt, he launched himself into the “Macarena.”

  “That’s my boy.” Q started cracking eggs, but Ferdinand completed a circle and bumped him out of the way, snatching up a knife and beginning to chop at the jalapeños.

  “These eggs might make you weep,” he said.

  “Your dancing’s going to make me weep,” said Q.

  Several seconds went by before Ferdinand realized his friend had neither returned to the table nor cracked the remaining eggs. Instead, he was staring into the sink.

  “I gave you that,” he said slowly, reached down, and lifted the bowl. It was white, with a picture of an apple-cheeked Red Riding Hood and a particularly sleazy, slobbering gray wolf under a red-checked bedcover painted on the bottom.

  Ferdinand nodded. “Revenge, I think. For that…” Skeleton piñata? Was that right? What had started them trading gifts like that?

  Eventually, Q shrugged. “Still no reason to put bran in it.”

  “Sorry. Go sit.”

  Ferdinand wound up folding in so many peppers that the eggs turned sticky green-brown, the color of the palm fronds that somehow sucked nourishment from between the particulates in the L.A. air and kept growing alongside every deserted sidewalk and choked roadway. When presented with his plate, Q nodded his approval absently, flooded his entire plate with Tabasco sauce, then gulped it all down in silence.

  From his own seat, Ferdinand stared past his friend, through the strings of dust drifting in the air like lines on an old TV set, into his living room. There was his old brown vinyl couch, the cushion on one side collapsed like an exhausted lung. Past the couch stood the matching free-standing bookshelves he’d bought from IKEA a few years back on a splurge, then accidentally assembled upside down so that the rough sides pointed out. Books crammed every available inch of those shelves, and piled up on the floor, too. He spent the great majority of his non-school time in there, so the dust all over everything surprised him.

  Cracking open a Corona, Q fished a lime out of a baggie he kept in his shirt pocket, squeezed some into the beer, and drank half of it in a single draft. Then he sighed, returned the lime and baggie to his pocket, and crossed his ankles beneath the table. “Okay. What’s it going to be, Ferd? What we gonna do with all this time? Santa Anita, bet us some ponies?”

  “Too poor.” Ferdinand initially waved off the new bottle Q offered him, then took it after Q popped it open with his thumbnail, the way he always did.

  “How ‘bout over to Swinger’s, case us some ladies?”

  Ferdinand smiled. “Too tired of people. And we’re too fat.”

  “Plus, you dance funny. Okay, your turn.”

  “Clifton’s,” Ferdinand said.

  Immediately, Q slapped the table with his open palm and laughed. “Hot damn. Clifton’s, for some roast beef.”

  “And a pudding.”

  “Pudding, too.”

  “Eat in the trees.”

  Q laughed again. “Remember that time there, with the waterfall, when Moe—”

  “Milt,” Ferdinand corrected, and Q stopped.

  Both men stared at each other. For the third or fourth time that morning, queasiness bubbled in Ferdinand’s stomach. Finally, Q pushed a breath between his teeth.

  “Milt,” he said, as if the word were foreign, brand new to him.

  “Pretty sure. Can’t remember anything else about him, but that was his name.”

  “Just a kid.”

  “Field trip, maybe.”

  “Must have been.”

  After another few seconds of looking at each other, then down at the table, Ferdinand got up and put the dishes in the sink. The idea of Clifton’s Cafeteria really did seem right. They’d tuck themselves at one of
the tables by the indoor waterfall, beneath the giant fake trees, then sit for hours and watch Hollywood hustlers work the ground floor and get in arguments with Grand Market wheelchair thieves, while retro Zoot Suit thugs swung pocket watches and cribbed betting tips from old ladies stuffing themselves with French dips and dripping sauce all over their Santa Anita racing forms. Best people-watching in Los Angeles.

  “Hey, Q. After Clifton’s, how about the main library? Check out some books we finally have time to read.”

  “Just as long as none of them’s Flecker,” Q barked, and leapt to his feet to toss his second empty Corona into Ferdinand’s recycle bag.

  This time, Ferdinand’s smile didn’t make him nauseous. Just wistful. Teaching in an academic system that had ditched Dickens, Twain, Dickinson, Hurston, Faulkner, Hughes, and Wright as either too difficult for the students or irrelevant to their lives, Ferdinand had devoted a week or more, over thirty-plus years of objections from department chairs and district “curriculum advisors,” to The Golden Journey to Samarkind. Partially, this was because there were always one or two kids, each year, who responded to poems about getting somewhere else. Partially, it was because not one of the parents who’d actually turned up for Back-to-School night had heard of Flecker, a fact Ferdinand never failed to enjoy, since the parents almost invariably asked if he weren’t the Spanish teacher.

  Mostly, though, Ferdinand had stuck to Flecker because that’s what his father had read by campfire or starlight during his frozen three-week crawl up the cactus-strewn wastes of El Camino del Diablo over the border into Great Depression Arizona in 1938.

  “For lust of knowing what should not be known,” he found himself mouthing, for the thousandth time in his life. “For lust of knowing what should not be known.” His students would forget him, every one. But in their most haunted hours—on their wedding night, maybe, or the day they fled town, or the eve of their very first gangbang—one or two would inexplicably murmur the forlorn phrases of a twilight-of-the-Empire British twit who’d dreamed hard and died young. A pathetic legacy, maybe. But a legacy, nevertheless.