Cries for Help, Various Read online

  Gift

  Put on these Indian flyer things here.

  What are you talking about?

  These.

  Put them where?

  On your ears, I guess.

  Have you lost your mind?

  No. Why?

  I am not putting those on my ears.

  I think that’s what they’re for.

  You think those are earrings?

  What else are they?

  They look more like bagpipes, or porcupines. Put them on your ears.

  I got them for you.

  Well take them back.

  I can’t.

  Why not?

  The Indians said they would kill me if I tried to exchange a purchase. Tribal law allows this, owing to the long history of broken treaties, etc.

  The earrings are moving.

  Good God.

  Those are porcupines. They sold you drugged porcupines. You are a fucking idiot, even before you announced I was to wear them.

  How was I to know what they are? All I know about porcupines is that they eat buildings.

  That is probably why the Indians won’t exchange them for something that does not eat buildings.

  Why didn’t the Indians just kill them?

  Instead of get money from you to take them away?

  Yes.

  I don’t know. That’s a hard one.

  I couldn’t see them well. They were half in the box, in tissue paper.

  Something in a Dell computer box, weighing forty pounds, they tell you is earrings, and you buy it.

  They said it was some kind of “flyer things,” they mumbled, I thought they meant some kind of ceremonial headdress, not mere earrings, I don’t know.

  I think this is a transitional relationship.

  What is?

  You and me. You and I.

  Transitional?

  Yes. Crossing.

  Into what?

  Into not a relationship.

  Because I bought you some earrings that turn out to be live animals? You regard that as an infraction?

  That you expect me to strap twenty-pound balls of deadly quills to my head, yes, that is an infraction.

  I don’t expect it now that I see what they are.

  That makes it even worse. You’d be somehow less stupid if you drugged me now and tied these things to my head.

  You fly off the handle at the least provocation. I think you are right. The relationship is ABC. I will find a woman who does not freak because you buy her a surprising gift.

  I’ll have a lot of fun telling people about my ex who bought me porcupine earrings, whole porcupine earrings.

  A gross distortion. They’ll know you are crazy.

  I won’t be able to deny it, for having been with you up to that point.

  Your whole life will become a fabric of lies if you start saying shit like that.

  Shit like what?

  Forget it. I bet these guys make good pets if you can keep them from eating the house. I think I’ll ride out to the rez and thank the Indians profusely. They’ll be laughing at me and it will be perfect. I’m in a new zone. We’re all stupid, finally, baby doll, so you might as well get free in the deep end. Where you can maneuver.

  Sisters

  You won’t believe what Steve did yesterday.

  Steve who?

  Steve Peanutbrain.

  What?

  He bought two porcupines and expected me to wear them as earrings.

  So? Did you?

  I did not. They weighed twenty pounds apiece and started moving. For starters.

  Ralph the boinkologist last week invited a squirrel to breakfast in our house and fed it eggs and jelly at the table. I said what the hell was going on and Ralph said, “Hey, this guy went to the fifth grade.” The squirrel looked up from the industry of chewing through a jelly pack and tipped his hat to me. Ralph had put a hat on him. He was the size of a small bear.

  Maybe he had been to fifth grade.

  That’s what I’m thinking about then. I asked why Ralph didn’t give the guy some jelly from the jar and he said he’d already been through that with the guy. The squirrel had found the jelly pack at a picnic and wanted to eat it and he wanted to open it himself. We watched him nibble around the jelly pack. He dropped it and retrieved it from the floor and was back in the chair with unbelievable quickness. His hat fell off and Ralph put it back on his head.

  So all in all you had a better time of it than I did with Steve offering me porcupine earrings.

  I guess I did.

  When will it ever end?

  What?

  Life, I guess.

  Has it begun?

  I think it has.

  Well if it has, it is going to end soon enough. We don’t have much in the way of prospects. Our husbands are bringing rodents into the house for odd purposes. They arguably are not of sound mind.

  We are with them, so we are not of sound mind either.

  Would we be any worse off, really, had you strapped the porcupines to your head and had I had a bite with the squirrel at my own table?

  I’d be worse off, you might have gotten away with it. I’d be in the hospital.

  People must talk about us.

  Yes. And tell me, do you want to hear what they have to say?

  No.

  Life can go on as it must as long as I do not have to listen to people talk.

  Maybe this is what Steve and Ralph are onto. They aren’t exactly out there soliciting the approbation of people or listening to them. Steve finds it funny that the Indians think they duped him.

  What Indians?

  The Indians who sold him the porcupine earrings, telling him apparently they were ceremonial headdress.

  That’s funny.

  That’s why he bought them, I think. I maybe overreacted.

  I think you did.

  Maybe you were a little short with the fifth-grade squirrel.

  Maybe I was.

  Maybe we owe some apologies.

  I think we do. Let’s have a cookout.

  Steve’s pretty mad.

  We’ll wear teddies, like a Hefner scene. Or I have this very sexy old-fashioned tan two-piece. Get the squirrel a case of jelly packs. What do the porcupines eat?

  Treated plywood, I think.

  We have that.

  I really don’t like people, you know that?

  We are sisters!

  I will try a little P.T. plywood myself.

  The Lord is my shepherd. Shall I want?

  You shan’t. What do you mean, tan two-piece?

  It’s like flesh-colored. Hideous. Very sexy in 1959.

  There is something so noble about cheap, bad clothing.

  The whole business of being a refugee. What is more noble than that?

  Are we refugees?

  We are. We are armchair refugees, but still refugees.

  We have refuged, or been refuged . . . how does the word work?

  I do not know. I only know that it is the club you want to be in, short of starving to death. If you are not in the club of the refugee then you are with the oppressors, the people who listen to themselves talk.

  The people who dismiss your bathing suit as out of fashion.

  Who scoff at squirrels to breakfast and porcupine earrings.

  We better be careful. We have a narrow line to toe.

  That we do, sister Yanniling. I feel a Pop-Tart hankering coming on.

  Perhaps South America

  The slender means of tying up the anaconda were in the Manual of Bevels. We did not have the manual. We had no idea what “bevels” meant. But it was a manual; we thought it was our survival manual. We had lost it, we thought. We were on the edge of a village, we surmised. The people looking at us seemed to be villagers, and behind them seemed to be a village. We had debated all morning what we were: insurgents or counterinsurgents, mercenaries or government troo
ps, rebels or establishment. There was a proposition on the floor that a group of us go to one end of the village and pretend to be drunk and say “Danny Ortega” and see what happened, and another group go to the other end of the village and pretend to be drunk and say “U.S. Marines” and see what happened. No one wanted to affix himself to either group. It was thought that we might actually be drunk and need not pretend. We had had nothing to drink, we thought, but still it seemed tenable that we were drunk. We were not hiding from the villagers as caution might have suggested. We had no weapons or any other signs of militariness about us but several of us were convinced we were somehow on the violent side of the fence, if there was a fence down here, wherever we were. It was the vaguest feeling, this notion that we were brutes, and no one was unhappy with it even if he doubted those who argued so hard with no evidence that we were soldiers of some sort.

  The one certainty was the big anaconda that we thought we had once had instructions to tie up. Two of us spoke with certainty of the Manual of Bevels and the rest of us felt vaguely familiar with the title and did not outright dispute that in it, if the book existed, there might well be instructions for neutralizing a large anaconda. The anaconda was, however, very passive. He looked about two hundred pounds and as if he could easily down a goat and no one really saw the need to tie him up.

  Someone said he thought the anaconda could talk, and no one disputed even this. We were not certain of much. A good-looking girl came by and smiled and no one knew what to do about it. Four or five of us proposed we sleep some more. This sounded like a good idea but we were nervous. Fenster Ludge said he would urinate on anyone who went to sleep, and four or five of us instantly napped out. The rest of us watched Fenster, who did nothing. Fenster was perhaps a person we knew to be all bluster. This was the most we thought we knew at that point in the ordeal.

  We wondered if we could get scrambled eggs from someone in the village. They had chickens running the range and the eggs might be very good, we thought. We came, we thought, if we thought free-range eggs good, from a place where the eggs were not very good because they might be not free-range. We could be Marines after all. “Yes,” Fenster said, “those are not Frank Perdue chickens.” Someone asked what he meant and he said he had no idea, but several others said that what he said felt as familiar as the Manual of Bevels and tying up an anaconda.

  “I am tired of this shit,” Larry said. “The manual is in the plane, the plane crashed, we walked out of there with amnesia, our guns are in the plane, fuck the anaconda, fuck Danny Ortega, I am going to get that girl.” Hear, hear! some of us cheered, but no one, including Larry, moved. Then Larry started taking off his clothes. No one paid much attention. Larry started inspecting his clothes closely, as if he did not quite comprehend what they were. He had them off and the rest of us also regarded them as curiosities, rather like a word that has been repeated many times until it seems perfectly odd and meaningless. Yet it did not occur to us to so inspect our own clothes or that our own might be curious also. When he had reached the point in his examination of his clothes that their meaninglessness itself seemed meaningless, Larry put them back on, agreeably shaking his head. Like the odd and meaningless word we agree to continue to use in spite of its nonsense, the clothes had a utilitarian value. Every one of us imagined the anaconda in Larry’s clothes. We looked at Larry and at the anaconda and back at Larry and then at each other and all laughed, all clearly on the current of the exact same idea. Of this we were certain, and nothing else.

  Fenster seemed to nap out and awoke in an agitated state saying his wife was leaving him. Larry said, “Fenster, that is what wives do.” This had a calming effect on Fenster, and on the rest of us. Conversation developed then that explored the wife-specific lacunae of our situation. We did not know, for example, that Fenster had a wife, nor did he, finally, know that he had a wife. Larry did not know if he had one. None of us knew anything about wives, our own or others’. This gap fit with the other gaps. The wives, we decided, were at the crash site, or at the altar, or they had repudiated us entire, perhaps before we had met them. We had wives but we had never met them. This is the way it always is and always will be, we decided. We were fairly secure and comfortable after this resolution of the wife lacuna.

  A rain of parrots came down on us. Bright turquoise birds with orange heads alighted on us. Some of us had two and some up to five birds. They did no violence to us, and no defecating, which we discovered were our two chief anticipations if a large bird were to land on you. The beaks of these things were as large as cow horns. We discovered that we were, festooned with parrots in this way, the only colorful spot in the landscape of the village. The village was a drab black and white, like a movie before Ted Turner got to it, someone said. Someone else said, “Get out of here.” Someone else said, “That girl who came by, smiling, who Larry said he was going to get, what a hound dog he is, never caught a rabbit and he ain’t no friend of mine, that girl had a red mouth.” This seemed to have been so. We concluded that the parrots and the girl’s mouth had color. The rest, to include us, was bleached out, or never filled in. To say, we did not know if our condition of colorlessness represented a removal of a quality or if colorfulness was an addition to a basal state of colorlessness. “We’d better be content,” Fenster said, “to just be cautious empiricists, given . . .”

  “Right,” Larry said. “Whoever said I ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, fuck you.”

  “You two should fight.”

  “Right,” Larry said. “Who said that shit about me?”

  No one could remember. Whoever said it was not afraid to confess but he was as unable as the rest of us to recall if he said it. We could not identify him partly because we could not remember what happened two minutes ago and partly, we thought, because we did not know our own names, beyond Fenster and Larry, who, having known names, suddenly looked to us, and even to themselves, very suspicious, as if they were plants or spies or some other stripe of interloper among us normal guys. We decided to have a roll call. We gave ourselves five minutes to recall or make up the name we would go by. We agreed to abide by whatever we came up with, as you agree to sit the entire semester or year in the same seat you first choose in some classrooms.

  “Fenster.”

  “Larry.”

  “Fuck you two guys. Bonhomie.”

  “Travis.”

  “Turk.”

  “Tork.”

  “Sam.”

  “Turl.”

  “Teal.”

  “Tod.”

  Okay. There were ten of us. That made things handy. We might as well use a base-10 numbering system if we got around to that.

  When it was full dark, the parrots removed to the trees, we longed for girls like the smiling one to come out of the village and visit us but they did not, and airplanes rolled in issuing thunder and lightning, black-and-white brimstone and fire. This, we knew, should have frightened us, but it did not. We did not take cover. It would be a better learning experience to observe the damnation with our full attention. Our full attention would be compromised if we were to scramble under, say, pieces of tin and culverts and banana trees. So we sat there as if at a noisy picnic. No one got hurt. The village went up in flames. The villagers danced in silhouette against the orange mayhem.

  Fenster yelled, “Take me down to funky town!”

  Larry said, “Shut up.”

  Tork said, “Teal, that is the gayest name I ever heard.”

  Teal said, “I don’t dispute it.”

  “Look at that,” Turk said.

  The woman with the red lips flew by on a flying carpet doing this Egyptian dance thing, her palms pressed together and her head doing that side-to-side thing. It was a joke dance, a cartoon of some sort of cultural irony, we thought. We think we thought this. It was a big thought, unsafe for empiricists, and difficult to entertain even in calm tranquility, and we were not in calm tranquility, we who were being bombed.

  �
��She’s goofing,” Bonhomie said. “She is not doing that as a serious expression of herself.”

  “What I want to know,” Turl said, “is is that number serious anywhere? I mean how does someone presume to know how Egyptians moved?” This was the position we held. She flew on into the jungle, into darkness not illuminated by the exploding ordnance, her bright red mouth decreasing and disappearing like a taillight.

  We awaited her return, and we knew that awaiting her return was at once what we could not avoid and what would paralyze us and doom us. There was nothing for it. Paralysis and doom and belief in something better than paralysis and doom is all we are given, men with assumed names and occasional parrots and bluster and bad memories in a black-and-white landscape. We were hound dogs who would never catch a rabbit and we were no friends of ours.

  Confidence

  I don’t think, today, that I think much or have much to say. But let’s sit here and see. That is a compound verb. I do not have a compound eye, or brain. Some people do, the latter, some insects the former. They look menacing and intelligent. The dragonfly in particular looks like a small but lethal military unit.

  Now I am thinking of turds, small and lethal non-military units. It is snowing so I do not have to go to the gym. I should want to go to the gym, and maybe I do, and maybe I will, go.

  The snow looks like blown rice. I am new to snow. I like it when it resembles popcorn and floats back up, and thwartwise, at points on its way down. I wish I had a place to plant five thousand trees on. Blue trees, perhaps. I would like it most if they were from seed in good rows about five inches high, no bigger than annuals, blue, in perfect grid array, a tree carpet. One of the benefits of living alone is unguarded farting.