Rumors from the Lost World

Stories by Alan Davis

©1993 Alan Davis

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 92-85452

eISBN 978-0-89823-295-0

All Rights Reserved

Edited by Vivian Vie Balfour

Editorial Assistance by Paul J. Hintz

Cover Painting by Catherine Davis

Author Photo Courtesy of Minnesota State University Moorhead

Book Design and Typesetting by Peregrine Publications

16 15 14 13 12 11     2 3 4 5 6 7

Alan Davis, Senior Editor

Suzzanne Kelley, Managing Editor

Wayne Gudmundson, Consultant

Allen Sheets, Art Director

Thom Tammaro, Poetry Editor

Kevin Carollo, MVP Poetry Coordinator

The publication of
Rumors from the Lost World
has been made possible by generous grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (from an appropriation by the Minnesota Legislature). Additional support has been provided by the First Bank System Foundation, Liberty State Bank, the National Endowment for the Arts (with funds appropriated by the Congress of the United States), the Star Tribune/Cowles Media Company, the Tennant Company Foundation, the United Arts fund, and the contributing members of New Rivers Press. New Rivers Press also wishes to acknowledge the Minnesota Non-Profits Assistance Fund and the McKnight Foundation for their support.

All characters in these stories are fictitious; any resemblance between them and real people, living or dead, is coincidental.

Printed in the United States of America

New Rivers Press books are distributed nationwide by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution.
www.cbsd.com

For Catherine,
and for Sara, and Dillon

 

 

 

When they stirred in their sleep

we fell through the crust

sometimes to the waist,

to the topmost branches

 

 

of the trees in which frozen

birds perched,

waiting for the sky to melt.

 

—Michael Hettich,

   from
A Small Boat

Some of the stories in
Rumors from the Lost World
were published in different form in the following places:
ArtsJournal
,
Beyond Borders: An Anthology of New Writing from Manitoba, Minnesota, Saskatchewan, and the Dakotas
(New Rivers Press, 1992),
Crescent Review, Denver Quarterly
,
Fiction Review, The Greensboro Review, Kansas Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Northland Review
;
Pulpsmith
, and
Roberts Writing Awards.
Our thanks to the editors of these publications.

 

The poem by Thomas McGrath is from
Selected Poems, 1938-1988
, published by Copper Canyon Press. Used with permission.

 

The excerpt from
A Small Boat
(University of Central Florida Press, 1990) by Michael Hettich was used with permission of the author.

 

The author wishes to thank the Minnesota State Arts Board for a Fellowship, Moorhead State University for its support, and Ragdale for a room with a view. The author also wishes to acknowledge Vivian Vie Balfour's editorial assistance and the support of C. W. Truesdale and Katie Maehr, who have done a great deal of work on behalf of this book.

Shooting the Moon

Ramparts Street

The Eviction

Growing Wings

AWOL

Tomorrow Is My Dancing Day

Waiting for Ruth

Incoming Rounds

World Poetry Slam

Raccoons

Sidewalks White like Bones

Going West

is anyone
completely here?

 

—Kathryn Levy

 

 

You out there, so secret.
What makes you think you're alone?

 

—Thomas McGrath,

Selected Poems, 1938-1988

I
had baseball cards and books about time travel, my brother Edward had the television, my father double shifts at a factory job, my mother housework and a secret wish for a baby girl. We reached for nothing greater, but my grandfather was different.

Once a week I walked him to the local library. If I got lucky, he entered quietly in his flannel shirt and overalls, waved his black glove, and chose a few books. On the way back to our white frame house, he swung his rubber-tipped cane for balance, the crook on the end like a bishop's crozier. On the front stoop, cuffs tucked over the shoestrings of his work boots, he lit up one of his King Edward cigars. “You kids know nothing. They've filled your head with crap.”

He paced his attic room, as foggy as a London street in a Sherlock Holmes melodrama. Cigar smoke swirled away through tiny gable vents and his face with its squints and wrinkles came clear in the flare of a match. He was an atheist and a socialist; somewhere in his book-lined haunt above my bedroom was a newspaper article about George Bernard Shaw he liked to read to me. Sitting on a packing crate, I wasn't able to make much sense of what he read, but it was heady stuff, and I swayed in his rhetoric as his black glove tapped across the page. He wore the black fur-lined glove because surgery left the hand freezing on the outside and burning on the inside. My father was often away nights, working his double-shifts, so my mother trudged up the stairs with a porcelain bowl of hot water balanced against her good hip. Grandpa needed his soak.

Even so, there would have been no heated discussions about nursing homes had he submitted gratefully to this Florence Nightingale act. Her two boys weren't old enough to minister to him, only to listen as she braced the slopping bowl of scalding water and planted a foot on the next step, groaning and gathering a breath, but she appreciated the man who sent me to the corner store for cigars. He gave me tip enough for a box of Good N' Plenty, licorice candies with pink-and-white sugar shells. The man who sat at our formica breakfast table with his magnifying glass, reading quietly for hours, accepting refills of coffee with a professorial nod, was comforting to her. She thought his political opinions were nothing more than the cantankerousness of a man whose favorite team had lost the World Series.

Nothing was further from the truth. When I was unlucky, he worked himself into a rage before we even reached the wooden red-shuttered library. On our final visit there, he scowled at Mrs. Douglas, the front-desk librarian who knew my mother, and vainly searched the card catalog for radical primers. “They've got books in here that make goddamn fools out of people,” he said, loudly enough to be heard across the long room. “I don't want my boy here to grow up to be a fool. Do I have to take him downtown to get him a book worth reading?”

After a few minutes of this, Mrs. Douglas got on the telephone, gesturing emphatically, speaking at a staccato pace, and my mother soon arrived in the wood-paneled station wagon. Through the library's plate-glass window I saw her try to parallel park. She wasn't very good at it, especially when aroused. She kept turning the wheel too abruptly. The rear tire kept bumping into the curb. I knew she would lose patience and leave it that way, angled out like a gangplank into traffic.

Mrs. Douglas hovered behind the counter, stroking her chin. It was the gesture she used on any patron who got out of line. “Ruth,” my grandfather shouted to her, “why don't you just sit down on your ass and play the fool?” My fingers ticked on the frayed binding of a green
Reader's Guide.
The library was hardly the local hangout, but a couple of my classmates were there, staring oddly in my direction. A middle-aged member of the Ladies' Auxiliary put down the latest popular novel and crossed her arms. Had God (who in my imagination looked something like Mickey Mantle, right down to the pinstriped uniform) entered the library at that embarrassing moment and promised to make the old man vanish, I would have taken cover on the far side of the card catalog and told The Mick to have at it. My grandfather was the kind of straight-backed old man who attracted scorn instead of pity; he would never surrender to reason, fatigue, or even to my mother.

She strode through the door and said something to him in an angry whisper, and even now it's hard to tell what happened in the conventional style of reminiscence. “Bitch,” he answered. “You're a little fascist, that's what you are, a little bitch of a fascist, working your husband to death to fill your house with crap.” She slapped him so hard he raised his bad hand instinctively. The black glove flew in a small arc and landed five feet away. I picked it up and held it just so by one of its fingers. It felt soft to the touch, as though the fingers had somehow worked it smooth from the inside. Looking at nothing else, I followed it to the back seat of the station wagon, where a cop was placing a parking ticket under the windshield wiper. I tried on the glove, still warm and moist, and cursed the capitalists before losing my nerve and laying it to rest on the seat. My grandfather, face flushed, a welt already showing on his lower cheek, limped past the wagon, his right arm twitching. “Goddamn fascist bitch,” he muttered.

My mother wedged herself behind the wheel and stuffed her mouth with a stick of chewing gum. She noticed the ticket and her jaws started working double-time. Without a word, she turned on the wipers. The ticket fluttered to the asphalt. She gunned the motor and whipped the station wagon around, nearly sideswiping a VW bug. The car's owner, opening a door for his wife and child, gave her the finger.

She gripped the steering wheel with one hand, elbow resting on the window well, and waved a cigarette with the other. “I'm sorry you had to see that,” she said. “Grandpa's just old, poor thing. He's had his disappointments.” She flung her wad of gum into the street, took a deep angry drag on the cigarette. “It's too goddamn much. I'll tell you one thing. He uses that kind of language again, he's gone.” She stubbed out the cigarette. “Your father wants to put him somewhere, great. Otherwise, he can live on skid row with the scumbags and loonytunes.”

That evening my parents argued in their bedroom below me. “I'll go there first,” my father shouted. “That's for people who can't function, who have to be spoonfed, have to be wiped.” My mother said something quietly, but in that tone of voice that could vibrate right through you.

“We don't always
earn
our afflictions. Sometimes they just
happen,”
my father answered, so loud I could tell he was drinking. “We want a girl, you can't have more kids. Is that your fault?” They were up and down all night, using the toilet, opening the refrigerator, the conversation flaring up over and over again like a fever. Above me, my grandfather paced out the disturbing rhythm of his own thoughts. He had big dreams as a young man, hoped to go to college, become a labor leader. “He wanted fame and women,” my father once said, “never mind the fortune.” Something obscure happened, though, something to do with the Great Depression. He ended up spending his life on county roads, repairing watches. Then his eyes went bad and his wife died.