Collected Short Stories: Volume III Read online

  "I'll be back in a minute." Reese hurried to the men's room and locked the door. He had to pee real bad. Hovering over the urinal for the better part of a minute, nothing emerged. The whole front of his underwear was a gooey, golden mess. His plumbing was busted! Another thirty seconds petered away. Still nothing. Then, just as he was getting ready to zip up his fly, the urine dribbled out in a fitful broken stream, and Reese began pissing molten lava in five different directions. The searing, white hot pain - it felt like Roto-Rooter had just reamed out his urethra.

  "You don't look so hot." They were back out in the parking lot.

  "No, I'm Okay."

  "Here, this should perk you up." Felicia snapped off a huge chunk of peanut brittle.

  Peanut brittle, the drug of choice for gonorrhea. Just what Reese needed! "Yeah, that tastes great. Thanks a million." He could feel his legs going rubbery as he slid into the car.

  Reese hurried back to his room and called a doctor. "I'd like an appointment."

  "New or regular patient?" the receptionist asked.

  "New."

  "Nature of the visit?"

  "An infection."

  "Where exactly?"

  Reese considered his options. "It's a venereal disease."

  "Tomorrow at two," the woman spoke in a nasally monotone. "You'll need to arrive fifteen minutes beforehand in order to fill out paperwork."

  Reese hung up the phone and began to cry. He cried because, in the better part of twenty years, his gonads had never let him down. They always performed properly, kept their own counsel and never gave him an ounce of grief. And what did he do? He copulated with the town whore and, in the bargain, bartered away his otherwise perfect health. Idiot! Moron! Cretin! Moral degenerate! Well, the great American novel, which wasn't getting written any time soon, would have to wait just a little bit longer.

  What was it Felicia told him at the motel just before they drove to Len Libby and the seventeen hundred pound chocolate moose? Cassie might stop by later. Reese wasn't going anywhere special. He wouldn't let on to anything. When the timing was just right, he would let the fat whore from South Boston's infamous D Street Projects know exactly what he thought of her debauchery. And the prissy Mrs. Fitch was no better. Never a kind word, she ran the Scenic View Inn with an autocratic, iron fist. The motel was shorthanded. When Reese pulled a double shift the previous Tuesday, the cantankerous woman never even paid the mandatory time-and-a-half much less thanked him for his loyalty. Life sucked. There was no hope for humanity. Nothing was ever what it seemed to be.

  * * * * *

  Earlier that morning before his shift started, Reese traipsed down to the beach. An adolescent was skim boarding on the bubbly outgoing surf. Throwing himself down on the warm sand, he scanned the shore. A bunch of sooty terns were wading about in the shallows. Much smaller and darker than the gulls, they scrupulously avoided the noisy tourists and more aggressive birds.

  Caw! Caw! Caw! Far more numerous were the gulls. Reese spotted herring gulls, a scattering of ring-billed terns and a solitary black-legged kittiwake. All the herring gulls sported a blotch of bright red on the underside of their bottom beaks at the furthermost tip. How come he had never noticed that distinctive anomaly? Describing nature - a writer was supposed to report what he saw not what he imagined. The herring gulls' tails were porcelain when observed in flight out over the ocean, but once they set back down on the sand, the topmost tail feathers were decidedly gray. Everybody thought they knew what a herring gull looked like, but much of what they imagined was slightly off-kilter, just a tiny bit askew.

  And oddly enough, sea gulls weren't really sea gulls. They had no salt regulation glands and needed to return to land to obtain fresh drinking water. The birds were scavengers and in the Old Orchard Beach area increased their numbers by feeding on human garbage dumps. Reese had learned these things from reference books at the Scarborough Public Library and shooting the breeze with some of the local residents.

  Rising from the white sand, he pulled off his sandals and began walking in the surf toward the pier in the far distance. Cassie - a.k.a. Typhoid Mary with the lascivious grin - would be just settling into work at the boutique about now. She could infect the entire boardwalk with pestilence and never lose a minute's sleep. How had he missed all the cues? She was crass and vulgar. In the course of a single week, she could fornicate with a dozen men and still find time to spread the creeping crud to yet one more unwitting soul. At face value, Cassie Moffat seemed the sweetest thing, but as with sea gulls that didn't really live off the sea, first impressions counted for nothing.

  Smoke and mirrors. Nothing was ever what it seemed to be. When they exited the Len Libby Chocolate store, Felicia said, "I want to show you something precious." Reese was preoccupied with his soggy crotch. He wanted to go straight home to die or rot away to a pus-covered heap of nothingness. But he followed Felicia across the parking lot to a stand of huge willowy grasses bordering the rear of the candy store. "What do you think?"

  “The plants,” he mumbled morosely, “resemble those tall reeds with the brown seed pods that grow in marshy bogs.”

  "Yes, but this is a grass," Felicia protested. "See how it's gone to seed at the top?"

  Each slender green stalks rose ten feet or more in the air to a sandy-brown plume of fuzzy seedlings. "Why are you showing me this?" His penis was beginning to throb again and his underpants felt ridiculously wet. Did he have to pee? Would there be another profusion of needle-sharp blades slicing his urethra to a tattered mess that vaguely resembled the elegant plant's tasseled crown?

  "Oh, I don't know." Felicia turned back in the direction of the car. "It's such an astonishing plant. I thought you might find it interesting."

  * * * * *

  Cassie never returned. He sat in his room waiting for the clandestine showdown with the female Antichrist but the girl never resurfaced. By now his genitals were a muddled mess. He wrapped a wad of toilet paper around the offending party in an effort to staunch the flow of putrid pus. Peeing was abject torture followed by a solid ten minutes of residual, scalding agony. Eventually the pain subsided but only until the next episode.

  His freshman year at college, Reese minored in psychology. One day toward the end of the semester Reese asked the professor about treatment for character disordered personalities. “There is none,” the professor shot back sardonically. “The underlying pathology is structural… like a load-bearing wall in a house. Remove the two-by-fours and the whole goddamn structure topples down on your head.” The professor was describing Cassie Moffat.

  "Reese, let me in." An insistent pounding at the door announced Cassie Moffat's belated arrival. The digital clock on the night table read one in the morning. He opened the door, and the girl brushed past him as though she was a long-term resident of the Scenic View Inn. "We gotta talk."

  "Funny you should mention it."

  "I got this little problem." She rushed ahead without waiting for a response, "It's a gynecological thing….Chlamydia." She sat down on the bed but almost immediately jumped up again. "I'm almost a hundred percent cured now, but my doctor says that anyone I slept with in the last month ought to take precautions. Just follow the directions on the label."

  Only now did Reese notice the white paper bag in her left hand. He took the bag and removed a plastic container. Ciprofloxacin.

  "You sure are a mess!" Cassie was ogling the mass of yellow blotches peppering his underpants. Reese slumped down in a chair and began to cry. "What's the matter?"

  "I'm sorry," he blubbered.

  "For what?"

  "For damning you to hell,..for being a holier-than-thou shithead."

  "I give you the clap and you're apologizing to me?"

  "You said it was Chlamydia."

  "Same difference," Cassie brought him up short. The girl wandered over to the card table where the IBM Thinkpad lay closed. "Looks like you're making progress with the book."

  "How's that?" He wiped his cheeks dry
with the heel of a hand.

  Cassie gestured at the wastepaper basket. "No crumbled sheets."

  "Nothing's really changed. I switched over to the laptop."

  Easing down on the bed, she draped an arm over his shoulders. "I'm not a bad person," she said softly. "I just do things that ain't a hundred percent kosher. There's a difference."

  Reese was still having trouble catching his breath. "I'm only just beginning to figure that out."

  “Maybe next time around I'll hit the jackpot and meet a swell guy like you." The girl brushed his cheek with her lips and slipped quietly out the door. Reese filled a cup of water from the sink and shook a green pill into the palm of his hand from the cylindrical container. First thing in the morning he would call and cancel his appointment with the doctor.

  * * * * *

  The first week in August, three new housekeepers were hired and Reese went back to general maintenance full time. Cassie's antibiotic knocked down the infection within the first three days to the point where he noticed no more pain or pussy discharge. His 'little friend' was back to normal. All was right in the world. Felicia stopped by his room one night after work. Her mother wanted to know if he could help out with a pool party planned for the weekend. "I want time and a half."

  "Really?" Felicia's normally deadpan expression lightened. "She doesn't indulge me with overtime and I'm her daughter." Noticing the outdated laptop computer, she ran her thin fingers over the keyboard. "My mother gave you this?" Reese nodded. "It was my brother's. Two years this November, Joel was killed in a car accident." The somber expression deepened several shades. "My mother hasn't been the same since."

  When Felicia was gone, it occurred to Reese that nothing was ever quite what it appeared to be. Cassie pulled herself out of the D Street gutter only to land face down in a similar pile of effluvia several hundred miles north in Old Orchard Beach. And yet, the ever-resourceful girl still managed to find a doctor and bring Reese the medicine. That took guts!

  Mrs. Fitch blustered about the Scenic View Inn like some crotchety bitch on a stick. Who knew the woman was heartbroken? Grieving? It flew in the face of logic, not to mention every law of nature, for a mother to bury her child.

  Labor Day was approaching. Toward the end of August, Reese made his way down to the boardwalk. He found Cassie just finishing her shift at the sweatshirt boutique. "This is for you... a little, end-of-summer, going away present." Reese reached into a bag he was carrying and pulled out a slab of Len Libby dark chocolate. Breaking it in two he gave her the larger piece. "It's from the store with the life-size, chocolate moose."

  "That's so sweet!" She raised the chocolate to her lips. Using her top teeth for leverage, Cassie snapped off another piece of the dark chocolate. "This is really good stuff - not like that cheap sugary crap they sell on the boardwalk.""How's the writing coming?"

  "About the same." The Ferris wheel fifty feet away was spinning at a dizzying clip. Reese stared at a T-shirt with a naked woman sitting in a martini glass. "Do you remember," Reese deflected the conversation, "the dark haired girl you spoke to at the Scenic View?"

  "The skinny one with the dark glasses?"

  "Felicia said you have the loveliest smile." Reese watched the Ferris wheel gradually lose speed as the ride wound to an end. The cars at the top swayed abruptly backwards when the machine finally creaked to a stop precipitating an outburst of childish hoots, giggles and squeals. "The loveliest smile, “Reese repeated. “Those were her exact words."

  Cassie led the way down the causeway leading to the ocean. A young boy nibbling on a cone of cotton candy scampered by. The tide was out, but a handful of families with small children clustered close by the foamy surf. Reese felt her body leaning into him, but there was nothing suggestive in the act. A young father was teaching his daughter how to ride a boogie board in the shallows as they approached the ebbing surf.

  Back to Table of Contents

  A Chinese Bar Mitzvah

  Mr. Chen took his dog for a walk in the park bordering the athletic field. The Shih Tzu, Wei-shan, seemed out of sorts, sitting listlessly on her haunches with a befuddled expression as Harry strapped on the harness. Fifteen minutes later as they passed a slender birch near the Little League diamond, the dog's front legs buckled. The hindquarter shuddered spastically - once, twice - before the body went limp and Wei-shan lurched forward on her chest. The bulgy, dark brown eyes remained open, while the pink tongue drooped perversely coming to rest on the fresh-cut grass.

  Mr. Chen crouched down beside the stricken animal and laid a hand on the dog's turgid belly. The fur was still relatively warm but then, it was late summer with the temperature edging up on eighty degrees. No movement, no sign of life whatsoever, the dog was gone. By now a crowd had gathered. Slumped over the dog with his hands pressed to his eyes, Mr. Chen was crying softly. "What’s happened here?" An off-duty policeman umpiring second base, pushed through the crowd. "Do we need an ambulance?"

  "That won't be necessary," Ida Goldfarb confided in a hushed voice. The sixty-eight year-old widow, who power walked the scenic trails each morning after breakfast, was nearby when the dog collapsed. "His dog died."

  “Tough luck!” The cop rubbed his crotch. The home plate umpire, who had temporarily suspended play when the commotion occurred, blew a sharp blast from his whistle and resumed the game.

  Mr. Chen pulled himself together. He washed his face at the water bubbler. A sympathetic bystander offered him a wad of Kleenex so he could blow his nose. "The attack,,, it seemed so sudden." It was the same woman who spoke to the off-duty police officer.

  "The dog was always so healthy and full of fun." Mr. Chen’s composure deserting him a second time, the man paused until he could speak again. "I'll have to make arrangements to dispose of the body."

  "There's a lovely pet cemetery overlooking Narragansett Bay in Tiverton,” Ida noted. “Each grave has its own tombstone or marker, some or more elaborate than others." The woman's overly solicitous tone only compounded Mr. Chen's misery. Ida took a step closer, placing a hand on his shoulder. "My brother-in-law cremated his collie, Rusty; he keeps the remains in a brass urn over the fireplace mantle."

  "I appreciate your kindness." Given his rather limited financial resources, Mr. Chen would opt for mass burial.

  Ida made a fretful face. “I don’t usually talk to strangers.” Actually,” she continued in a confidential tone, “I don’t hardly talk to anyone, because of my condition.”

  “What condition?” Mr. Chen didn’t really know what he was saying anymore.

  “I clam up around people… go verbally catatonic. But when I saw you all torn up over your misfortune - ” Ida took a deep breath and released the air in short puffs as she studied the carcass of the prostrate animal. “Anticipatory fright… that’s what a psychiatrist called it - a high-class, twenty-five cent term for an irrational fear of nothing in particular.”

  Did he really care about her free-floating anxiety and childhood angst? Harry Chen desperately wished that the chatterbox with the saggy jowls and neurasthenic personality would evaporate like the early morning mist.

  "Hey, mister.” A freckle-faced boy wearing a Tedesco's Supermarket T-shirt was slouching near the home plate backstop, a catcher's mitt wedged under his armpit. The youth was gesturing frantically. “About your dog… she ain't dead no more.”

  Sure enough, Wei-shan was sitting upright with her grizzled chin resting on the manicured lawn, the pinkish tongue having retreated back behind the crooked front teeth. The animal, which still wasn't stirring or doing much of anything, was very much among the living. Placing a hand under the dog's stomach he cradled the dog against his chest. Wei-shan hardly flinched, nestling on his forearm like an inanimate object.

  Maybe it was the late-summer heat that caused the unfortunate episode. Domestic pets were just as vulnerable to bad weather as humans. But the way Wei-shan keeled over, like an over-the hill, punch-drunk prize fighter kayoed by a crunching uppercut, didn't s
uggest heat stroke or any fleeting ailment. “The dog should see a doctor.”

  Mr. Chen stared at his hands morosely. “I’m rather strapped for cash.”

  The dog grunted and ran a pink tongue over its bristly lips before drifting back off to sleep. “Well then, maybe this is your lucky day.”

  Mr. Chen gawked at the flabby woman with the designer jogging suit and Sony Walkman. “My son’s a veterinarian with very liberal payment plans for people in a financial bind.”

  “I don’t take charity.”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so,” Ida pointed at the dog, “but what about her… does she take charity?”

  *****

 

  Ida Goldfarb called her son, Robert, at the animal hospital. "I met an oriental man, Mr. Chen, in the park. He has a sick dog but can’t take the animal for treatment, because he’s living on a fixed income and hard up for cash."

  "What breed?"

  "A Shih Tzu - jet black with a wispy gray goatee. Very cute." There was a slight pause. "Aren't you going to ask the dog's name?"

  "I was getting to that."

  "Wei-shan, which means ‘great and benevolent’ in Mandarin. It's a male name but Mrs. Chen, who passed away a few years back, never confirmed gender before choosing."

  "What’s wrong with the dog?"

  Mrs. Goldfarb described what had happened. "Have your friend bring the dog by the office tomorrow in the late afternoon."

  "He's not my friend. I hardly know the guy." She hung up the phone.

  The following day, Mr. Chen arrived at the Brandenburg Animal Hospital in the late afternoon. Robert placed a stethoscope on Wei-shan’s narrow chest. "Dog's got a heart murmur... about a three."

  "Three what?"

  "Three out of six … a moderately-severe heart murmur." He handed the instrument to Mr. Chen, while continuing to hold the metal disc in place.