The Woman Who Married a Cloud: The Collected Short Stories (19 page)

She got up, her face still a mushroom cloud of viciousness. Without a second’s pause, she strode off down the street, leaving her embarrassed man behind. He looked at me, shrugged helplessly, and moved off after her.

Stunned by what happened, I stood there not knowing what to do. A werewolf?
That
beautiful woman? It was impossible. I heard the skittering sound of wheels and saw a young black boy coming down the street on a skateboard. When he got to us, he braked skilfully and bent down to pet the dog.

“Hey, I know this dog. It’s a Zoondel, right?”

“Yeah, uh, right.”

“Can I pet him?”

“Sure.” I kept watching the couple walk down the street. The man caught up with her and waved his hands around.

When I looked down at the boy playing with my dog, the first things I saw were the eyes. They were yellow.

“These dogs cost a fortune, huh?”

Bright yellow.

“Come on, Mailbox! Let’s go!” I yanked him hard and pulled him behind me down the street.

“Hey, mister, what’re you doin’?”

I bent down and scooped the dog into my arms. I started running.

“Hey, white chump!”

I ran and ran until I got home. Without thinking, I skipped the elevator and ran up five flights of stairs to my floor. If it were true, if they really were werewolves as Kak had said, why hadn’t they tried to kill the dog, like the person who’d thrown the stone at us? I closed the door behind me and locked it fast. Putting Mailbox down, I looked into his eyes. They were dark again.

I watched the news again that night and found the answer to my questions. I think. I found them when I saw the latest report of the mass murder in White Plains. The killer was reported to be a quiet man who’d never done anything strange in his life. Just one day loaded a submachine gun and started killing people. It happens all the time, doesn’t it?

That’s the answer. It happens all the time because these people don’t know who they are until it happens. Then they know. The woman and the boy on the street don’t know yet, but they will. They will after they have done something horrible and evil and inhuman, like the quiet man with the machine gun. If they’d seen Mailbox after that then, like the person in the window, they would have tried to kill him. But until that time, they think he’s only a sweet little dog, just six months old. And that was the answer to my earlier question. Why are so many of these terrible things happening these days? Because if it’s true and Mailbox can “tell”, then the world is once again full of these ... things. God help us.

How do I know this? Or rather, how can I
say
this? Because I went out one more time that night to see if I was right. I let anyone touch the dog who wanted to. Twenty-three. I counted twenty-three people alone in this small part of this large city who touched my dog and made him glow.

“T
ELL ME A HONEY STORY.”

“I’ve told you all my Honey stories.”

“Come on, there’ve got to be hundreds, knowing her.”

“Did I ever tell you about the cigars?”

“No!”

“Honey’s father Leo smokes cigars. Once he had five hundred of them which had somehow gone bad or stale or something. Anyway, Honey came over one day with this giant plastic bag filled with them. It looked pretty unattractive; like a big bag of turds.

“She asked me if I knew a guy named George Reynolds, who was an old boyfriend of hers. Nope, I don’t know George. Great, then I wouldn’t feel bad about what we were going to do. Uh-oh. What
are
we going to do, Honey?

“We’re going to his apartment because he’s out of town for a week. We’re going to plant these five hundred cigars in every nook and cranny in his place. The kitchen cabinets, under the cat-box, in his coffee cup ... the works. He’ll be coming across them for the next five years.”

“And you went?”

“Sure I went! It was one of the few times Honey had a plan that didn’t include scaling the Brooklyn Bridge at midnight. It was also a pretty funny idea, you’ve got to admit.”

“It is. What happened? Do you want more coffee?”

“No, I’m fine. So we went over to George’s with the cigars. His parents live in the same building. Honey knocked on their door, his mother answered and was thrilled. Apparently the two of them were great friends and even had lunch sometimes. Anyway, she gave some cock-and-bull story about having to get into George’s apartment and the woman gave us the key.

“We got in there and went to work stashing cigars everywhere. Under the cushions of the couch, under it—”

“That doesn’t sound so imaginative.”

“Wait! That’s just the beginning. The obvious places were covered in about ten minutes, but we still had hundreds of the damned things left. Hundreds! So we got serious. One in each record album cover, under the bed mattress, in his slippers and then all the shoes in his closet ... At the end we got pretty desperate trying to think of other places to stick them. But we did it and finally sat down, absolutely exhausted. I didn’t want to see another cigar for the rest of my life, although I was pretty pleased with the way we’d done it.”

“Did you ever hear what happened when he got back?”

“Wait, you’ve only heard half the story. About ten minutes after we’d finished, Honey, in her inimitable way, took a hundred-dollar bill out of her pocket and held it up in front of my face.”

“Where’d
she
get a hundred dollars? She’s always broke.”

“I know. She held this very beautiful hundred-dollar bill up and said, ‘I’ll give you this if you can find at least four hundred and eighty of those cigars in two hours. I’ll give you the other twenty as a handicap.’ ”

“Whoa, what’d you do?”

“What’d I do? I told her to start counting the minutes. I started looking, obviously. You’ve never seen anyone move so fast in their life, believe me. And the first two hundred were easy as pie. I was surprised at how many hiding places I remembered. Funny places too—five in a closed suitcase, five under his darkroom enlarger. They were a cinch.

“But then I suddenly had only an hour to go and two hundred and eighty to find.”

“What was she doing while this was going on? Sitting on the couch and smiling?”

“Worse. Sitting on the couch, smiling,
and
smoking one of those ratty cigars. I wanted to kill her. Just seeing her sitting there enjoying the whole thing made me mad as hell. I was determined to find them, even if I had a heart attack doing it.”

“Attagirl!”

“Attagirl nearly did have a heart attack. You get crazy doing something like that. When I had forty-five minutes to go, I was so nutsy-desperate that I started looking in the same places as before. Honey was laughing her head off. Which of course made me even angrier. But then I had a brainstorm that solved the problem.”

“What was it? Wait! I have to go to the bathroom. I’m dying. But don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

He leapt up and flew out of the room. His girlfriend closed her eyes and smiled, relishing the memory of the look on Honey’s face when she realized something was up and she just might lose this bet.

“All right, I’m back. Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Yeah yeah, come on, tell me how you beat her. No one beats Honey Dilz, according to you.”

“This time I did. You know how? A list. That’s all. I made a list of all the places I’d looked and then kept referring to it as I moved around the apartment.”

“That’s smart! Exactly. Just do a process of elimination.”

“Right. The only problem was it took about five minutes to find the paper and pen and make up the list.”

“But it worked?”

“Pretty much. I had three hundred and fifty by the time I had half an hour left. She started getting nervous then! She tried to distract me the whole time by waving the hundred around and saying, ‘Half an hour. Better get mo-ving!’ Things like that.”

“Because you had her on the run!” He crossed his arms contentedly and snorted at the thought of Perfect Honey Dilz on the run.

“That’s right, but I still had a hundred and thirty to go. Run around a room making lists, find the cigars, and make sure Honey’s keeping count correctly. You know she’ll cheat you in two seconds, given the chance. It was worse than a three-mile sprint.”

“All right, all right, so what happened?”

“So I had fifteen minutes left and forty cigars to go. She’s kibbitzing the whole time and I’m actually beginning to
pant.
I sat down on the floor and closed my eyes like a goddamned swami and told myself to relax, cool it,
think.
That took a few seconds because then in a flash I realized I hadn’t looked closely enough in the bathroom. Zoom—head for there! That was it. Up above the toilet was a cabinet where George stored extra toilet paper. We’d put one in each roll and that was a fast twelve. God, I still remember the numbers exactly. Then there were five floating in the tank.”

“In the tank? You put them there?”

“Honey did, but I was looking everywhere by then. A few were on top of the cabinet and a few were hidden among the spare towels. Three were under the sink with the cleaning stuff ...
Voilà.
Four hundred and eighty cigars.”

“Bravo!”

“There’s more. As I was heading back into the living room with a couple of minutes to spare, I saw three stuck behind a photograph on the wall. I added them just for good measure. I even lit one up coming into the room.”

“She must have died.”

“No, she was a real pro about it and handed the hundred over just like that. I was impressed and a little guilty. Being the great and generous person that I am, I thought I’d do a Cyrano de Bergerac and make a grand gesture. When we were out on the street again I turned to her and said, ‘Honey, I’m going to take you out for a hundred-dollar lunch right here and now. We’ll blow this whole thing on one meal.’ ”

“That’s nuts! You could have used that for walking-around money for a couple of weeks.”

“True, but you’ve got to admit it was a hell of a gesture.”

“Yes, it was. Where’d you go?”

“Coco’s.”

“
Coco’s
? Unbelievable. Was it the greatest meal you’ve ever had?”

“The best. Everything was perfect. The chocolate mousse for dessert cost more than my last skirt.”

“I’ll bet. What was the bill?”

“A hundred and ten dollars. I paid it and Honey paid the tip.”

“Big deal, the tip. Congratulations, you got her.”

“Not really.”

“Why?”

“Well, after lunch we took a walk and I
had
to ask her where she’d gotten the money. Her parents are loaded, you know, but she never asks for any. She has less than I do, i.e., Poverty Incorporated.”

“Yeah, I wanted to know that too. Where
did
she get it?”

“Where? I quote Honey Dilz. ‘Oh, found it in George’s desk drawer.’ ”

“Ha! Isn’t that typical? Too proud to take money from her parents, but not to steal it from old boyfriends.”

“That’s not all. She also told me about this thing she’d found way in the back of another of his drawers, like it’d been hidden there? George is a photographer, but he does a lot of sketching and painting too. She said she found this in-credibly detailed drawing of a coffin. At first she thought he might be designing an album cover for a rock band. You know the kind of dreggy things they do. But she realized it was too quiet and subtle for that. Plus, on the other side of the drawing were all kinds of different letterings, all saying the same thing—George Reynolds, the day he was born and died, and then the line, ‘He Finally Learned How to Leave.’ He was designing his own coffin, down to the last nail and inscription!”

“God, that’s worse than finding dirty pictures of him, isn’t it? Perverse. Is the guy sick? I mean,
is
he dying?”

“According to Honey he isn’t, or wasn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, that’s what’s weirdest. You know that god-awful newspaper,
The Truth,
that you get at the market?”

“Sure, I love it. Last one I bought, the headlines said, ‘
I HAD SEX WITH AN ALIEN
.’ ”

“That’s it! That’s the one! In that exact issue there was an article on superstitions and where they come from. Do you remember?”

“No, I just read about alien sex, then someone at the office stole the paper off my desk.”

“It was interesting. It explained why people say ‘God Bless You’ after someone’s sneezed, or tell you not to step on the cracks in the sidewalk ... Anyway, there were a couple I’d never heard of. One of them said, ‘Find a man’s secret places and you start him towards death.’ ”

“So?”

“
So,
don’t you get the connection? We went all through this guy’s apartment, looked in all his ‘secret places’ hiding those stupid cigars, and then lo and behold, Honey found the drawing. We’d started him towards death.”

“Get out! Of course she’s going to find it if she goes through his desk!”

“But listen—George said he didn’t
do
the drawing. Honey asked about it and he didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“Oh, bullshit! Wait a minute, did you make all this up? Is any of this true?”

She licked her lips and, after a long moment, shook her head no. The two of them grinned at each other, which opened into knowing, intimate smiles. She’d done it again. Even though she didn’t get to give him the spooky end of the story she’d already worked out in her mind, she had succeeded. Enthralled him again, as much as if they’d been in bed together and she’d worked him close to orgasm. He loved her stories, it was one of the things that had been so attractive about her from the beginning. He’d never known a woman who could do it so well.

Then the most shocking thing happened. He was thinking about her imagination, how in a moment she could think up things like drawings of coffins and superstitions that sounded so real: “Find a man’s secret places and you start him towards death.” It was right there, right as he finished relishing the words and the ideas for the second or third time. A silence had fallen between them. She, to let her story sink in (she knew he liked to think about them a while in silence), he to savour it. But in that silence, or rather his half of the silence, he made one of those terrible, wounding discoveries that are so painful because they are true.