Collected Short Stories: Volume IV Read online

  Sarah blinked and felt the breath catch in her throat. “Hadn’t thought of that.”

  Rob eased the blade across the stone a half dozen times before flipping the knife and working the opposite side. Testing the edge gingerly with a thumb, he reached for the second stone, which was grayish white and considerably smoother.

  He snaked a bead of oil over the new stone and repeated the process, lowering the angle several degrees. “I was in Boston near Copley Square the other day. Coming out of the subway not far from that Gothic church near the public library, I caught sight of a disheveled, fair-skinned guy with thinning blonde hair careening toward me. He was babbling to himself… some unintelligible drivel.”

  Rob suddenly laid the knife on the table and stared bleakly at the back of his mottled hands. “When I graduated high school fifty-two years ago, Lars Nilsson, was our high school valedictorian. The blonde-haired brainiac, was a straight-A student and president of the honor society. He won a full academic scholarship to Brandeis…was voted most-likely-to-succeed.” “Over the years I heard rumors that he’d gotten weird… dropped out of college in the second semester of his junior year… was arrested for barbiturates.”

  “The deranged fellow you saw in Copley Square…,” Sarah interjected.

  Rob nodded. “Somewhere between Brandeis and downtown Boston, Lars Nilsson sailed his perishable dinghy a tad too far from shore and fell off the edge of the known world.”

  “And you’re telling me this now because…”

  “Maybe you should brace yourself in advance of what you’ll find in Unity.”

  “You think my friend’s gone bonkers?”

  “Not necessarily,” Rob backed away from the damning prospect. “Perhaps a bit eccentric.” “Regardless,” he cautioned, “you best keep an open mind. The Midge Parker hunkered down in the backwoods of Maine may not even remotely resemble the urbane creature from your college days.”

  Finished with the sharpening, Rob began stropping the edge by pulling the blade backwards. Every so many pulls, he reversed direction honing the opposite surface. Satisfied with the look of things, he held a strip of paper between a thumb and index finger and lowered the knife until it made contact with the sheet. The blade glided through the paper effortlessly. “It’s just a weird scenario… the way Midge chucked all her worldly attachments and is travelling incognito… flying under the radar.”

  “You think I haven’t considered that?” When reminiscing about her friend, the image of Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher, flitted across Sarah’s mind. In later years the author of the Tao had vanished, gone off in seclusion to seek nirvana, contemplate his navel and pursue whatever it was that blissed-out, otherworldly types did in their twilight years.

  But Midge Parker was an inveterate, suburban housefrau, a woman who shopped the local mall and visited the hair salon at least once a month. And then, there was that unsettling remark about Moby Dick, when they were sprawled in the surf at Horseneck beach. Was it an ominous metaphor, a subtle hint of impending psychic upheaval?

  Rob ran the water in the sink, rinsed the stones clean and patted them dry with a paper towel. “Let’s get some rest. We got a long trip in the morning.”

  * * * * *

  Traffic north was minimal. Forty-five minutes into the trip, they spotted a Paneras and pulled off the highway. Approaching the entrance to the restaurant, Rob lagged far behind. Sarah noticed that her husband of forty years walked considerably slower these days. Where only a few years earlier the man was still quite limber, now he dawdled along with a shuffling, herky-jerky gait.

  Ordering a spinach soufflé, Sarah glanced about the restaurant. Those diners who weren’t preoccupied with their breakfast were fiddling with cell phones, laptops or IPods. Everyone seemed caught up in their insular universe. “Are you familiar with the parable of the two monks?” she asked. In recent months Sarah had developed a fondness for tidbits of Eastern trivia – Zen koans, Sufi sayings, haiku, and Persian aphorisms.

  Her husband’s features dissolved in a closed-lipped smile. “Never heard of it.”

  She recounted the story, sipped at her tepid coffee then added. “There’s a hidden message, but I’ll be damned if I can wrapped my brain around it.”

  “We all carry tons of excess baggage,” Rob ventured. “Trick is figuring what to do with all the mental trash.”

  “Yes, that sounds about right.” Eating in silence, they were back on the road in twenty minutes.

  How is it that you are still carrying the woman, when I left her at the tea house five minutes ago? Sarah felt her face flush hot with an odd mix of shame and moral indignation. When exactly had Sarah slipped into the untenable role of younger monk to Midge’s unencumbered free spirit? Even back to their college days, Midge always exuded an air of false bravado. No – that wasn’t terrible accurate. In her twilight years, having pared away her wants and needs to a bare minimum, the aging widow was travelling light. She would exit this world much as she entered.

  How many of Sarah’s friends and relatives had squandered their best years, lived mired in regrets and shackled to an unforgiving past? Midge’s husband died young. The medical bills upended her sedate, middle class existence. Rather than become embittered, she used the tragedy as an opportunity to reinvent herself, in the late December of her years to embrace act two of the bittersweet adventure. As Hal alluded to in his terse, no-nonsense commentary, most people drown under the suffocating weight of accumulated, excess baggage. Midge side stepped the emotional debris. She went incognito, disappeared into the solitary wilderness of central Maine.

  As they sped north the landscape altered, maples and oaks replaced by hawthorne, elm, and occasional bitternut willow. A mile outside of Augusta they pulled into a rest area. Sarah noted that the trash barrels were covered with heavy steel lids; a sign tacked to a pine tree warned visitors against leaving food unattended. There was no mention of bears, but the underlying message was unmistakable. The country had grown desolate. A solitary farm gave way to five miles of empty space, a scraggily, rock-strewn riverbed and forested ravines. Every so often a ‘Moose Crossing’ highway sign appeared. They sped past a dozen or more signs but never a solitary moose.

  Leaving the interstate, they cruised east on a narrow road. The traffic petered away to nothing. The road zigzagged in a roundabout manner so that they had no idea what direction they were actually heading. Thirty minutes later a small sign on a faded, wooden placard tilted at a cockeyed angle plaintively announced ‘Unity five miles’.

  * * * * *

  “The rooming house where Midge lives is just up the street.” Sarah was pulling on her walking shoes. They had checked into the bed and breakfast and hauled their luggage into the room. “I thought I might pay her a brief visit before we settle in for the night.”

  Her husband was staring out the window at a main street no more than three blocks long before fading off into wooded fields. “I’ll be here when you get back.” After the tedious, drawn-out journey Sarah felt conflicted abandoning her spouse, but the trip was neither vacation nor personal lark. Without further discussion she left the room, cracked the front door and stepped out into the sultry autumn afternoon.

  Sarah crossed the street, veered sharply to the left and struck out down the pebbly sidewalk. A group of young girls dressed in cotton skirts that stretched far down to their ankles and sleeves that buttoned at the wrist passed on the far side of the street. Sarah had heard about Amish farms and settlements in the region. She slowed in front of a dilapidated, three-story wooden structure. The slate blue paint was peeling profusely. Checking the tenant directory, Midge Parker’s name was prominently displayed three rows down. A wave of weariness bordering on panic shook the legs out from under her. Sarah blew out her cheeks sharply and slumped down on the topmost step.

  What if, what if, what if…

  What if Midge Parker had experienced some belated midlife crisis and morphed into Lars Nilsson, a drooling, glassy-eyed androi
d who barely recognized her former friend? Sarah waited a few moments until her breathing became steadier, rose and climbed the rickety stairs to the third floor.

  “Can I help you?” A massive black woman with a silver ring embedded in her left nostril was staring back at Sarah.

  It took her a moment to collect her scattered wits. “I’m looking for Midge Parker.”

  “She ain’t lived here for six months.” The woman replied tersely and made a motion to shut the door.

  “But her name’s on the directory downstairs.”

  “Landlord never bothered to remove it,” the black woman muttered. “That lowlife don’t do much of anything around here.”

  “She’s an old friend and I travelled quite a distance to find her.”

  “Well, you’re out of luck, cause she’s gone.”

  Her weary brain in freefall, Sarah felt the blood throbbing in her ears. “Gone where?”

  “Don’t hardly know. You’re the second person come looking for Ms. Parker.” The black woman, whose stony expression never wavered, slipped out into the dimly lit hallway. “About a year ago Midge’s daughter come for a visit, but that was a bust.”

  “How so?”

  “Seems like the daughter was experiencing major cash flow problems.” The woman sniggered wickedly. “What a mooch!”

  “What happened?”

  “The woman started a ruckus… using foul language and threatening the mother, but Midge held her ground, and after a while the bitchy daughter went off in a snit.” The black woman seemed to derive great pleasure recounting the story. “The daughter… she never come back.”

  “You don’t know where Midge moved?”

  “Cleared her stuff out over a snowy weekend in late February and I ain’t seen her since.” The black woman rubbed her fleshy nose with a taut index finger causing the silver hoop to bob up and down. “Felt sorry for your friend… a rickety old lady living alone with hardly no friends and an ungrateful, loud-mouth daughter who come around only looking for a free meal.”

  “Midge wasn’t that old.”

  “That so?”

  “She’s only in her early seventies.”

  The black woman scrunched her face as though enjoying a private joke. “My grandmother just turned sixty-two so your buddy ain’t no spring chicken.” She stared at her pudgy fingers. “Last winter before I moved here I was living down the hallway and took sick with the flu. Couldn’t attend any of my classes over at the college. Midge Parker brought me soup and sandwiches every day until I was well enough to fend for myself.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Conservation Law. Be getting my degree in June.”

  “Well that’s nice!” Sarah tried to imagine the burly black woman with the slangy speech gussied up in a park ranger’s uniform, a broad-brimmed hat tilted at a jaunty angle over the squat face. Would they allow her the luxury of the nose ring or would the exotic jewelry be deemed politically incorrect?

  “When I took sick, Midge come by every day around noon,” The black woman continued, “with hot food. Wouldn’t take a freakin’ cent for the groceries. Sometimes that old woman talked in circles… all manner of silly-ass gobbledygook that didn’t hardly make no sense. But then… I dunno.

  “What did you talk about, when she came to visit?”

  “Nothin’ special. Mostly she talked books.”

  “Books?”

  “Moby Dick… she liked that one the best.”

  “So she told you about the whale.”

  “No, she hardly never mentioned the whale but once or twice. She told me how Queequeg got deathly sick after going down in the hold to find the oil leak. The harpooner feared dying at sea so he had the ship’s carpenter build a coffin, but then the fever broke and he got well. When the whale smashed the boat all to pieces, Queequeg drowned but Ishmael climbed into the coffin and floated away to safety.”

  The black woman smiled and nodded a nappy head peppered with cornrow braids emphatically. “Midge Parker sure was nice,” she reminisced.

  Midge Parker certainly was a benevolent if somewhat cryptic creature, and when Sarah’s odyssey was over, she would have travelled eight hundred desultory miles round trip to learn that unremarkable truth. She made a motion to turn away, but the black woman suddenly grabbed her wrist with both hands. Her fleshy lips screwed up in an attitude of intense deliberation. “Just remembered somethin’.”

  * * * * *

  “So, tell me,” Rob insisted, “how you finally hunted Midge Parker down?” They were travelling south on the Route 95 interstate just north of the New Hampshire state line.

  “As I was leaving the rooming house, the black woman remembered that Midge volunteered at the Unity Public Library.” Up ahead a bridge spanning the Piscataqua River connecting Portsmouth with Kittery came into view. “The reference librarian had taken her mother in to live with them when the older woman took sick with a stroke. The mother hung on a couple of years in failing health. After the funeral the family was looking to rent out the in-law apartment, and because Midge seemed such a dependable sort, they offered it to her.”

  “It’s just a single room with bathroom and shower, but Midge has kitchen privileges so she can cook and store food.” “Not,” Sarah added as a giddy afterthought, “that she would ever take advantage. The woman always ate like a bird.”

  Rob shook his head and smiled wistfully. “If the black girl hadn’t remembered that Midge volunteered at the library, the trip would have been for not.” “She still drive that Volvo?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Sold it and bought a three-speed bike with a straw basket strapped to the handlebars.” They passed a meadow overgrown with white trillium. “She had a falling out with her daughter. Elsa wanted a cash advance on her inheritance, but Midge told the ingrate to wait until her name appeared in the obituaries.”

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  107 Degrees Fahrenheit

  Kissing his sister goodbye in the lobby of the Bonanza Bus Terminal, Nicholas Holyfield was blind-sided by a wave of emotions. He hadn’t seen the tears coming, didn’t even have time to avert his puckered, soggy face. “Sorry.”

  Mary Beth only smiled and wiped the wetness away with the heel of her hand. The visit to Providence lasted two days. The bus to Boston was boarding now. She pulled him close for a final hug and said half-jokingly, “If you meet a pretty coed at college, bring her along next time.” She nuzzled his cheek with her lips, turned and limped away, swinging her crippled, left leg in a sweeping arc as though the errant limb had a mind of its own.

  Nicholas boarded the bus and sat next to a fat black woman, poorly dressed and smelling of body odor laced with Jean Naté. As he slumped down, the woman, who had been reading, looked up and smiled. One of the front teeth was capped in gold. Nicholas leaned slightly forward and peered out the window. Mary Beth was a good two hundred feet down the road headed in the direction of the East Side, her body bobbing up and down like a cork on rough, tidal water. The way she moved gave the false impression she was careening at a diagonal when, in fact, her forward progress was straight ahead.

  More tears came and, this time, Nicholas couldn’t shut the spigot. Like a toddler bereft of its mother, he was sitting on a Boston-bound bus crying inconsolably. His shoulders heaved, the breath caught in jagged spasms. The black woman glanced up curiously, opened her mouth but then closed it without saying anything. She turned her attention back to a pamphlet printed on cheap, grainy stock. The driver shut the door and threw the shift into reverse. Moments later, they were leaving Providence, Rhode Island, heading north in the direction of the interstate. Nicholas felt something soft and fluffy rubbing insistently against his wrist. The black woman pressed a Kleenex into his hand and discreetly turned away.

  The bus passed the statehouse exit; the ivory dome of the capitol building materialized and was gone in a blur. They entered Pawtucket with its grimy factories and mills. The mayor had been indicted for extortion a
nd racketeering the previous year and was now somewhere out of state at a country club prison for white-collar criminals. His biggest regret wasn’t betraying the public trust but being careless enough to get caught. “My sister was hit by a car.” Nicholas spoke, not so much from a need to unburden himself, but to justify his lack of restraint.

  “Dear God!” The black woman threw the pamphlet aside and stared at him. Her sympathy, though slightly theatrical, was genuine, not driven by idle curiosity. “She isn’t in a coma or on life support?”

  Nicholas frowned and felt the skin on his cheek draw tight where the salty moistness had evaporated away. “No. The accident occurred last winter while jogging. A car skidded on black ice. Broke her leg in three places.”

  “Driver drunk?”

  Nicholas shook his head. “Not hardly. Just an old lady returning from church at twenty miles an hour in a residential area. The car skidded on the frozen road. No one was at fault.”

  The black woman directed her eyes at her hands which were large and formless, devoid of jewelry except for a simple, gold band on the third finger of her left hand. “Why was your sister jogging in the middle of winter?”

  Nicholas reached into his breast pocket and located a wallet from which he removed a newspaper clipping. Underneath a picture of Mary Beth dressed in a sweat suit with a medal hanging from her neck, the caption read: Collegiate track star places in first, NCCA professional meet. “That’s my sister.”

  The black woman took the tattered paper and held it to the light. For a woman with hands like Stillson wrenches, she was remarkably gentle with the parchment-thin clipping. “I’m trying to recall,” she chuckled, “last time I was that thin, but my mind don’t travel quite that far back.” She handed the article back to him. “Where’d she run?”

  “The track meet was in New Jersey - East Rutherford. Fifteen hundred meters.”