The Wooden Sea Page 3

  “What’s up, Mayor?” I tried to sound light and friendly – the milky fuzz on top of a cappuccino you tongue through before getting to the coffee below.

  She pulled in a loud deep breath. One of those breaths you take before saying something that’s going to change everything. You know as soon as it’s out your world will be different. “Fred and I are going to separate.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  She laughed, barked really, and pushed her hair back. “That’s so you, Frannie, to say it like that. Everyone I’ve told so far says either ‘the shit!’ or ‘poor you’ or some such thing. Not McCabe.”

  I turned both hands palms up like what else am I supposed to say? “He’s going off to grow chili peppers.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what my first wife said when we split up. There’s this primitive tribe in Bolivia. When one of its members dies, they say he’s gone off to grow chili peppers.”

  “Fred hates chili peppers. He hates all spicy foods.” It was clear she needed something safe and inane to say to pole-vault her over the painful admission she had just made. That’s why I tried to help with the chili pepper remark.

  “How do you feel about it?”

  She worked on a smile but it didn’t work. “Like I’m falling from the top of a building and have a few more floors to go before I hit?”

  “It would be unnatural if you didn’t. I bought a coatimundi when I broke up and then forgot to feed it. Do you think the separation’s final, or are you just taking it out for a test-drive?”

  “It’s pretty final.”

  “Your doing or his?”

  Her head rose slowly. She stared at me with flames and daggers in her eyes but didn’t speak.

  “It’s a question, Susan, not an accusation.”

  “Was your breakup your fault or your wife’s?”

  “Mine, I guess mine. Gloria got bored with me and started fucking around.”

  “Then it was her fault!”

  “Blame is always convenient because it’s so decisive: My fault. Your fault. But marriage is never that clear-cut. He pisses you off here, you piss him off there. Sometimes you end up with a toilet bowl so full neither of you can flush it.”

  That conversation made me miss and realize again how grateful I was for my wife. It made me want to see her immediately so I went home for lunch. But Magda wasn’t there and neither was Pauline. Different as they were, the two women liked hanging around together. Anyone would like hanging around with Magda. She was funny, tough, and very perceptive. Most of the time she knew exactly what was good for you even when you didn’t. She was stubborn but not unbending. She knew what she liked. If she liked you, your world became bigger.

  My first wife, the inglorious Gloria, shrunk the world like heavy rain on leather shoes and made me feel like I no longer fit in it. She was beautiful, endlessly dishonest, bulimic, and as I later found out, promiscuous as a bunny. At the end of our relationship I found a note she had written and in all likelihood left out for me to see. It said, “I hate his smell, his sperm, and his spit.”

  Eating lunch alone, I contentedly sat in the living room listening to my thoughts and the buzz of a lawnmower someplace far away. If her marriage really was finished, I did not envy Susan the next act of her life. In contrast, I was at a place in my own where I didn’t envy anyone anything. I liked my days, my partner, job, surroundings. I was working on liking myself but that was always an ongoing, iffy process.

  Over the friendly smell of my bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, an increasingly pungent fragrance of something else began to butt in. I didn’t pay much attention while eating, but it became so pervasive as I slipped an afterlunch cigarette between my lips that I stopped and took a long, serious sniff.

  The nose can be like a blind mole brought up into the sunlight. Below ground—in your unconscious—it knows exactly what it’s doing and will guide you: That stinks—stay away. That’s good—have a taste. But bring it above ground, demand to know What’s that smell, and it moves its blind head around and around in confused circles and loses all sense of direction. I asked out loud, “What is that fucking smell?” But my nose couldn’t tell me because that smell was an incomprehensible combination of aromas I had loved my entire life. This is a crucial point, but I don’t know how to describe it so it makes better sense.

  A whore I visited in Vietnam always wore a certain kind of orchid in her hair. Her English was minimal so the only understandable translation she could come up for the flower was “bird breath.” Naturally when I got back to the States and asked, no one had ever heard of a bird breath orchid. And I never smelled it again until that afternoon in my living room in Crane’s View, New York, nine thousand miles from Saigon. Naturally my brain had long ago put the aroma in its dead-letter file and forgotten about it. Now here it was again. Remember me?

  But it was only one in a swirling, illusive combination of cherished smells. Cut grass, wood smoke, hot asphalt, sweat on a woman you are making love with, Creed’s “Orange Spice” cologne, fresh-ground coffee... my list of favorites and there were more. All of them were there together at the same time in the air. Once it had my full attention, neither my conscious nor unconscious mind could believe it.

  I had to stand up, had to find where it was coming from or I’d go crazy. The trail led to the garage. I remembered that in our conversation earlier, Magda had said how good it smelled in there. What an understatement! No room freshener out of a can could have matched that deliciousness. Cloves now, the warm healthy smell of puppies. Pine, rain on pine trees.

  The car was parked there looking friendly and cooperative. Hadn’t the mechanic come yet? If so, why wasn’t Magda using it now? The smell of new leather, a new book, lilacs, grilling meat. I kept a tool kit in the trunk. I hadn’t tried to start the car yet, but since I was standing right there, why not get out the tool kit just in case?

  What registered first—what I saw or smelled? I opened the trunk. The intensity of the odor multiplied by ten. And lying in there was the body of Old Vertue. Again. Under his red collar were the feather from the Schiavo house and the bone I had found in the hole I dug for him.

  Ape of My Heart

  George Dalemwood is the strangest person I know and one of my best friends. He is not strange in a “lives in a treehouse, wears chipmunkskin underwear and a red crash helmet” way. He’s just odd. I certainly would not like to live inside his head, but I love hearing what comes out of it so long as I am at a safe distance. And for all his eccentricities, the great paradox is what George does for a living—he writes instructions for how to make things work. How do you get that complicated new camera going after it’s out of the box? Read the instructions, George Dalemwood wrote. They are invariably clear, confident, and precise. Boot a computer program and get nothing but crashes? Read George and you’ll be rocking in no time.

  Most important, as a friend, he was unjudgmental and carried no preconceived notions about anything. Because I could not deal with what had just happened, I got into the car without another thought and drove to his house, dead dog passenger and all. Yes, the car started immediately, but I was too dazed to give that any thought. I just wanted to talk to George.

  His place is a few blocks from ours. Nothing special about it—one floor, four rooms, a porch that should have been fixed twenty years ago. When I arrived his young dachshund, Chuck, was sitting on a porch step licking its balls. I stepped over it and rang the bell. No answer. Damn! Now what? Then I remembered the engine in my car was supposed to be dead. The dead dog that was supposed to be buried was in the trunk of the car that was supposed to have a dead battery. Damn!

  I looked up at the sky hoping for divine guidance, or something, and saw George sitting on his roof staring at me.

  “What are you doing up there? Didn’t you see me ring your bell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well get down here, man, I need help!”

  In a toneless voice he said, “I would
prefer not to.” Which, in spite of everything going on, made me smile. Because George had been rereading Bartleby over and over for the last two months and said he would continue until he understood it. Before Bartleby he had been reading and trying to figure out Mount Analogue and before that, all of the Doctor Doolittle books. Every fookin’ one of them. George hoped when he died if he went to heaven, it would be Puddleby on the Marsh—Doolittle’s hometown. He was serious.

  “Would you like a Mars bar?”

  George ate three things and only those three: boiled beef, Mars bars, and Greek mountain tea.

  “No. Listen, I’m begging you as a friend, please come down and listen to me.”

  “I can hear fine from up here, Frannie.”

  “What are you doin’ up there anyway?”

  “Deciding the best way to describe erecting a satellite dish.”

  “So you have to sit up there to see?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Jesus! All right, if you’re going to be that way about it—” I went back to the car, started it, and reversed onto his perfectly kept front lawn until I was as close to the house as possible. I opened the trunk and pointed accusingly at the carcass. George slid on his ass down the roof a ways so he could see better.

  He was unimpressed. “Got a dead dog in there. So?”

  Hands on hips, afternoon sun directly in my eyes, I described what had happened with Old Vertue the last two days. When I was finished he asked only about the feather and the bone. He wanted to see them. I handed them up. He leaned over the edge of the roof to get them and, stumbling, almost fell off.

  “Goddamn, George! Why do you make life so difficult? Why don’t you just come down for ten minutes? Then you can climb back up there and be an antenna for the rest of the day.”

  He shook his head. After settling himself into a comfy position, he touched the bone to his tongue. If I hadn’t known him I would have protested, but my friend had his own way of doing things. If you were going to hang around with him you had to accept that. After a few licks, he delicately bit it with his front teeth but not enough to break it. Standing below, I could hear the high click of his teeth against it. Sort of like castanets. I got a shiver down my spine at the thought of putting that nasty thing in my mouth.

  “What does it taste like?”

  “I don’t know if it’s really bone, Frannie. It’s very sweet.”

  “It’s been lying in the ground, George! Probably soaked up a lot of—” I stopped when I saw he wasn’t listening. No matter what you were saying, if George wasn’t interested he stopped listening. It was a never-ending lesson in both humility and careful word choice.

  Next came the feather. That piece of evidence he smelled a long time but gave it only a glancing swipe with his tongue. That was somehow more revolting than the bone, and I looked away. I noticed Chuck had stopped licking his plumbing and joined me in staring up at his master.

  “You lick your nuts and George licks feathers. No wonder you two live together.” I picked him up and kissed his head while waiting for the lab report from the roof.

  George pointed the feather at me. “This has a great deal to do with what I was thinking about before you arrived.”

  “And what was that, pray tell?”

  “Conspiracy theories.”

  “You’re on the roof being an antenna and thinking about conspiracy theories?”

  He ignored me. “On the Internet there are over ten thousand sites devoted to the different secret plots people believe led to the death of Lady Diana. The essential motivation behind all conspiracy theories is egotism—I am not being told the truth. The same thing applies here, Frannie. You’re a policeman; you’re used to logic. But there is none here, at least not so far. You’re not being told the truth. Are you more upset at the dog’s reappearance or the simple fact it happened in your trunk and not someone else’s?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “There are two ways of approaching this—as mischief or metaphysics. The first is simple: Someone saw you burying the dog and decided to play a trick. When you left the forest they dug up the body and found a way to put it in your trunk when neither you nor your family were watching.”

  “What about the bone? I left that in my coat pocket. How’d they get it?”

  He held up an index finger. “Wait. We’re only theorizing now. They used the body to play a macabre clever trick on you. Which worked because look how upset you are.

  “The other possibility is it’s a sign from a greater power. It happened because you’ve been chosen for some reason. The dog reappears, the feather and the bone are together, and your car starts when it was supposedly broken. I’m assuming if this is the case, it wouldn’t start for Magda because the dog was already back in the car, waiting for you to find it. All this is supposition; there will be no understandable logic here because our logic doesn’t apply in matters like these. Wait a minute.” He moved to the far side of the roof and climbed down an old wooden ladder leaning against the house.

  He came over to us and tickled the dog’s nose with the feather. Chuck tried halfheartedly to bite it. “I want to show you something inside the house. But before that, I’ve got an idea I’d like to try. What would you say to burying Old Vertue again, in my backyard this time?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m curious to see what will happen. If he does return again, I won’t have to wait to hear the news from you.” He took Chuck from me, and the small dog went nuts licking his face.

  “Which do you think it is?”

  “Probably mischief, but I hope it’s the other.”

  “I don’t need God putting dead dogs in my trunk, George.”

  “Maybe it’s not God. Maybe it’s something else.”

  “That kind of shit’s off my Richter scale, bud. I have trouble enough living with a teenager. Remember when I got shot? I was close for a couple hours. Magda said they were thinking of calling a priest to give me the last rites. But did I do out-of-body travel to the big light? No. Did I see God? No.” I rubbed my face. “What about the smell?”

  He looked at the ground. “I don’t smell anything.” “What? You can’t smell that? Even now it’s knocking me down!”

  “Nothing, Frannie. I don’t smell a thing.”

  Unlike George, his house is normal. Everything is in order; everything as uninteresting as possible. Magda and I once went over for a dinner of boiled beef and Mars bars for dessert. Afterward she said, “His house is so ordinary you keep thinking maybe it’s creepy, but it isn’t—it’s just really dull.” The only thing that stood out were all kinds of brand-new gadgets lying around, waiting for Mr. Dalemwood to explain them to confused future consumers.

  “What’s this?” I picked up an object that looked like a mix between a CD player and a small Frisbee.

  “Don’t touch that, Frannie. It’s very delicate.” He was searching a shelf packed full of large-format art books. “Just sit down. I’ll be with you in a second.”

  “How come every time I come here you scold me for something?”

  “Here it is.” He pulled out a book as big as a door. Looking at his hand, he grimaced and wiped it on his pants. Then he opened the book and started flipping through the pages. “Wouldn’t you rather be called than tricked?”

  “Meaning what?” I picked up the CD Frisbee and put it down again.

  “Wouldn’t you like to have a metaphysical adventure rather than track down some bozo who’s just trying to make you look stupid?”

  “No. My family won’t let me watch The X-Files or The Outer Limits with them because whenever the strange stuff starts happening, I laugh.”

  Judging by his expression, George had tuned me out after I said no. But when he abruptly stopped flipping pages, a smile the likes of which I had never seen rose slowly up his face like a hot air balloon lifting off. Not only that. This was the second time in two days I had seen a look on another’s face that announced something big wa
s about to arrive and I’d better put on my seat belt for whatever was coming. The first time happened right before Susan announced her separation. But George’s expression was stranger because he was not given to great emotional splashes. If you didn’t know the guy you could easily have mistaken him for autistic. His response to things rarely arrived with a side order of exclamation marks.

  “ ‘Fear only two: God, and the man who has no fear of God.’ That’s from the Koran, Frannie.”

  Whatever that was supposed to mean, he came over holding the book open with two hands. He put it on my lap and stepped back. I looked at him for some sign but he only pointed at the page, that bizarre smile still locked in place.

  I looked down. My eyes widened to the size of planets. “No fuck-ing way!” I didn’t lift my head. My eyes raced round and round the picture. I couldn’t lift my head. “No fuck-ing way!”

  “See the title?”

  “Yes, George, I see the title! What am I supposed to do now? Huh? What am I supposed to do with this? Did I see the title? Am I stupid? I can read, you know—”

  “Take it easy, Frannie.” But he was smiling. The son of a bitch was still smiling.

  On the page in the book on my lap was a reproduction of a painting by an unknown artist, circa 1750. Remember that– seventeen hundred and fifty. It is a portrait of a dog. A three-and-a-half-legged, one-eyed, marble-cake-colored pit bull sitting facing us and looking peacefully off to the right. A white bird—a dove?—with wings spread is hovering over the dog’s head. Behind them in a valley is a castle. Behind that is a bucolic landscape that includes rolling hills, a meandering river, farmers at work in their vineyards. It would be easy to replace the dog with a lord or wealthy landowner standing on a hill above all he owned, all he has achieved in life, his heaven on earth, all there for us to see and envy. But it is not a lord nor is it a human being; it is a pit bull. And a very familiar-looking one at that.