Three Twisted Stories (13 page)

Dear Robert:

Sorry for the abrupt ending yesterday, but I know what a stickler you are for rules, and you know that I am doing my utmost to be the best Adjudicator I can. As you often say, when life gives you lemons, the good Adjudicator verifies a World Record for Most Lemons in a Twenty-Four-Hour Period!

Regarding the car: I’m afraid it’s another peanut-related incident, so not covered under the rental car agreement warranty. It seems that the transmission (which I noticed was slipping a bit when I made that U-turn in Florida) is gone. How a peanut got into the pistons is beyond me, but as Mr. Wooten says, “Them’s what happens in the swamp.” Ah, what a character.

In reviewing my report from yesterday, I have to agree with you that it took way too many personal detours. I apologize for this and promise to rectify the situation beginning now.

Buell nudged me awake as the airboat slid up against another wooden dock. This one was attached to a piece of land, the ubiquitous peat, upon which stood a simple one-room shack. The wood was clapboard, browned with weather and age, or perhaps singed from the Honey Prairie Fire. There was a strange glass in all the windows—Coke-bottle green with a round center that bubbled out to the edges. Victorian, I imagine. The first person to come out of the front door (in fact the only door) was an old, stooped woman with quite a long beard (I know what
you’re thinking, and no—Vivian Wheeler
¹
can rest easy). She kept her gnarled hands gripped together as she walked across the peat. I’m not sure if the ground was shaking or she was. She was quite old (though not Valentim
²
old) and I had to strain to hear what she said, which was “Welcome, darlin’.”

Robert, you know that as an Adjudicator, I take my work very seriously, but I cannot lie to you and say that I was completely prepared for this case. As I mentioned yesterday, I’d brought all the proper tools needed to measure and document Mr. Rothstein’s tongue, but it is with great shame that I admit I did not bring the one tool that would’ve been most useful in this situation, and that is a flashlight. This thought only occurred to me as I followed the woman into the shack. The green glass that I mentioned served to further filter the light, so that when I entered the room, I could barely make out my surroundings.

As my eyes adjusted, I took in several things rather quickly. There was a small bedstead pushed into one corner, a quilt laid over a bare straw mattress. An otherwise clean fireplace was set with wood but, thankfully, there was no fire. Metal implements adorned the walls: pitchforks and axes serving as objets d’art. Strangely, there was a large—I would say at least 60″—plasma-screen television taking up one wall. The old woman patted the set as if it were a familiar, telling me, “A gift from Remmy.”

And that is when I realized the other thing missing from the room: Mr. Rothstein.

“Is he here?” I asked.

“Give ’im time,” she told me, pulling out a wooden stool I’d not noticed before. It was a three-legged stool, the fourth leg being currently used by Buell Rabinowitz, who at that moment clomped into the shack. He carried the badminton racket at his side, a piece of duct tape dragging along the ground like a tail.

“Remmy always late,” Buell said. He leaned against the fireplace. I noticed the ropy muscle underneath his homespun shirt. He glared openly at his mother.

The old woman carefully balanced the stool against the wall to make up for the missing leg. She teetered a bit, glaring back at Buell as if this was his fault, before finally settling down.

And then there was silence.

Well, you don’t send Adjudicators to Mrs. Dalton’s School of Manners and Social Conversation for nothing!

I cleared my throat a few times, then politely asked, “Where is Mr. Rothstein?”

“Don’t worry, gal,” Buell told me. And then, thank God for my work certifying the World Record for the Most Yiddish Puns Told in a One-Hour Period,
³
because I completely understood him when he said,
“A falsheh matba’ieh farliert men nit.”
⁴

The old woman reared up like an angry possum. “Don’t you derogatory my Remmy!” she snapped. “You ungrateful
fagala
.”
⁵

“Ku fartzer,”
⁶
he shot back. (I blushed.)

“Gai kukken afen yam.”
⁷
She waved him away like swatting a fly. Or maybe she was really swatting a fly. There were hundreds in the shack. I’d swallowed at least five since I walked in.

Buell could barely look me in the eye, but he apologized, “Sorry, Mama ain’t never liked me much.”

“Can you blame an old woman?” She ignored her son, kindly showing me a row of gums. “You a pretty girl. You married?”

I deflected that as easily as I did with my own mother. “You must be proud of Remmy for going after the World Record.”

“Remmy my pride,” the old woman told me. “Boychik over der”—she nodded toward Buell—“not so much.”

Buell’s fists clenched. A sprinkling of freckles showed under the sweat on his knuckles. The old woman tilted up her chin, daring him to come after her.

A chill went through me, and I gritted my teeth against the whimper that wanted to come out. Robert, you know I’m the daughter of Indian immigrants. The worst they ever did to me was tell me they were very disappointed I did not become a doctor like my two brothers or even a lawyer like my sister. This exchange between mother and son was shocking, like nothing I’d ever witnessed. And the language! Even during the great Domino Debacle, the worst Jimmy Butler managed to call me was a psycho bitch fuck. Granted, he was only nine years old at the time and hadn’t slept for four days because he was setting up his domino display to try to achieve the record (believe me, to this day I still have nightmares about bumping into that table), but the point I am trying to make is that the hatred between the two people in that swamp shack was so thick I could’ve easily certified it as the Thickest Hatred in the World. And you know an Adjudicator never exaggerates about World Records.

Again, the old woman teetered on the stool as she settled the three legs back onto the floor. Buell flinched as she stood with a sweeping, almost threatening, motion. She went over to the fireplace and placed her hand on a wooden box I hadn’t noticed before. It was quite lovely—cherrywood rubbed into a warm red, and small enough to fit in two hands.

Buell nervously eyed the box. “Mama, please. We got comp’ny.”

She patted the box, and I could tell she took a dark delight in its contents. She told me, “Remmy a good boy. He never do know it, though. Always tryin’ for things, never gettin’ ’em. Bless his heart.”

For just a moment, I felt a shock of panic. Was she telling me that Remmy was in the box? Had he passed away before I could verify his World Record?

And, I have to admit, there was another, more startling thought: had they killed him?

I know it’s silly to have these dramatic, dark ideas, but Robert, you must understand that in this kind of setting, one cannot help but conjure up
Deliverance-
like atrocities. Indeed, for the first time since I landed in Atlanta and drove the interminable hours down to this backwater swamp, I felt the sweat dry on my skin. Dry? Nay, freeze. And then it crystallized to dry ice when next the old woman stabbed her finger into Buell’s chest and said—

“You.”

Buell flinched from the hard jabs.

“You’s done got on my bad side today, ya freak.”

His lips trembled. He begged, “Mama, please.”

And she said, “I’m sorry, Robert. Mr. Wooten has just come out from behind the shower curtain. He forgot to tell me that the sheriff wanted to talk to me.”

Def. more tomorrow—

M

Dear Robert:

Greetings from jail! Please don’t panic—it’s just a misunderstanding about the car. Apparently, Jimmyz’ filed a bench warrant over the truck. No big deal—really! There is absolutely no stigma here about being in jail (haha, the locals say if they’re not in church, jail is where you can find them) and I’ve had many kind visitors. Until they found him in the storage closet, Mr. Wooten even kept me company. My God, that man has a lovely singing voice. I have to tell you, Robert, living in New York, you forget what a community is all about. But as to the jail thing—it’s fine. Really. Of all the Adjudicators you have to worry about, I am not one of them!

So let me continue telling you the story of what happened the other day. Two days ago! I can’t believe it’s been that long since I’ve had a shower. Honestly, now that I’ve had air-conditioning and water on a consistent basis, I’m thinking much more clearly. It just goes to show you how hardy these Swampers really are.

As I was saying, the old woman was taunting Buell. There was a level of hatred coming off her like none I had ever experienced in my life. She truly and unremorsefully seemed to despise him. I half expected her to take one of the axes off the wall and do something about it.

She said, “Today gone be the day, you don’t watchit.”

Then she put her hand on that cherrywood box. Now, macabre thoughts aside, it was a beautiful box, and probably very old (though not that
¹
old). The carving was incredibly ornate, and certainly you could not fit the ashes of a grown man inside the thing.

She said, “You wanna see ’em, boychik?”

Obviously, something awful was inside, because Buell had backed away the moment the old woman took the box off the mantel. I felt a little trepidation myself as she stuck her thumbnail into the catch and started to open it.

But then there was a clatter outside, feet shuffling across boards. I looked out the front door and there stood on the front porch the ugliest man I have ever seen. I know that the internal debate over whether to certify ugliness has been going on in the Assessors’ Office for years, but one look at this man would tell you there is not an uglier creature walking the face of the earth.

So ugly was this man that even now I cannot find the words to describe him. Was he unclean? Remarkably so. Was he hideous? Without a doubt. Was he hairy? Yes—but only to a point.

His face was remarkably clean-shaven, not even showing a trace of a beard. In fact, the hairline was almost completely receded, though his dirty, kinky braid ran from the back of his head to his waist. Shirtless, he presented a bare chest. His back, on the other hand, showed a carpet of hair that glistened with sweat. Tendrils poked up from the waist of his pants, a trail of fur touching the center of his belly button and shooting out like rays from the sun. His legs were hairy. His arms were hairy. His ears were hairy. My fingers itched to grab my ruler, my camera, my notebook. Justin Shaw,
²
Anthony Victor,
³
Toshie Kawakami
⁴
—for the love of God, Douglas Williams!
⁵
—why was this man bothering with his
tongue? He was magnificently hirsute, a textbook study in localized hypertrichosis!

But his face. My God, his face. Everyone knows that symmetry equates with beauty—a certain distance between the eyes, a straight, perfectly aligned nose, a pair of sculptured lips: these are the gifts that God gives beautiful people.

God gave this man nothing.

His nose was squarely out of joint, zigging and zagging down his shovel of a face. His eyes were too far apart on his head, giving him the look of a perplexed minnow. And his mouth. It was as if the awfulness had drained down, settling into his lips, giving them the twisted, wet look of two broken hot dogs resting atop the dirty bun of his cleft chin.

The old woman beamed at him as if he were a god. “Dis my Remmy,” she said, chest puffed out, hands proudly tucked into her hips.

Remmy seemed embarrassed by his mother’s obvious affection. “Afternoon, cher,” he told me, extending a long-fingered hand my way.

Har
, I thought. Buell said not to say anything about his
har
.

I forced myself to shake Remmy’s hand, to ignore the soft feel of hair on his palms, the feral odor coming off his hairy body. Robert, have I ever told you about the time my father took us camping? We left soon after setting up the tent because there was a bear in the area. We never saw the creature, but we could smell him—rotted meat, sweat, and dirty feet all rolled into a motley scent that made his presence known for miles.

That bear had nothing on Remmy Rothstein.

And with them both, I should’ve seen it coming.

Dear Robert:

Sorry for the abrupt ending to yesterday’s email. There was a bit of a riot. I say a bit because it was only four of us, but you’d better believe that shiv came in handy. Lord, those country girls are strong!

Back to Remmy.

For all his unnatural odor, there was something sweet about Remmy Rothstein. Was it his eyes, which were dark and piercing, like staring into the muzzle of a Glock 19? Being honest, the touch of his hand sent a cha-chunk into my heart, and I swear it was like a shotgun being pumped. (Sorry for all the gun metaphors; this is how you talk in prison. Did I mention we’re in prison now? The jail burned down.) Robert, I just have to tell you, if you didn’t look at Remmy’s face, or feel the prickly hair jutting out from his eyebrows, you’d swear to God he was George Clooney.

And the mouth on him! No, I’m not talking about the silky, soft hair on his tongue (though we’ll get to that later). He was the sweetest talker I’ve ever met in my life. He said I was beautiful. He said I was dainty. He said those moles on my ass look like the face of God. God, Robert! Not balloon animals (though I understand given our Adjudication that day why balloon animals were on your mind).

Was it all true? Am I beautiful? Am I dainty? Who knows? Let’s just say Remmy Rothstein made good use of his 57,782
¹
times.

But I was not there to fall in love. I was there to Adjudicate a World Record, so I set about telling Mr. Rothstein the procedures for verifying his claim. He told me he understood the process, and we agreed that we would proceed. The proper paperwork was signed (attached) and both Buell and his mother acted as witness.

While he went down to the water to shave his tongue, I used an alcohol wipe to clean the two metal rulers, as well as the measuring tape. I put these all out on a cloth napkin, as instructed in the Manual of Adjudicator Conduct (rev.), then tested the batteries in my camera and video recorder.

Mind you, we had to do all this outside in the daylight, but that was fine. I was beginning to enjoy the outdoors by now, and such was the sweat on my skin that the mosquitoes could no longer find purchase. Lemons/lemonade!

Rebekkah joined me outside the cabin, the box in her hand. (Did I mention the old woman’s name is Rebekkah? Thankfully, she’s my cellmate. All those years on the three-legged stool have given her thighs of steel. Combine that with the beard and there is no end to what the ladies will do for her. I haven’t had to wash my own laundry since I got here!)

Rebekkah stood by quietly, her eyes nervously going from me to Buell and back again. He leaned against the shack as he strapped back on his badminton racket, giving her equally beady looks. I kept hearing her earlier warning that he had gotten on her bad side today, but worrying about these two wasn’t in my job description, so I let it go.

Big mistake.

By the time I had tested everything and taken out a fresh pen to write in my notebook, Remmy was back. The sun was peering behind him, and I could see the wifty loops of hair off his shoulders. He rubbed his hands together as he approached. Up close, I recognized the features from the photos he sent in to the Assessors’ Office. The round, red lips. The gouge of the philtrum between his nose and mouth.

Buell hobbled over, unsteady on the peat. Rebekkah stood beside me.

I said, “All right, Mr. Rothstein. Show me your tongue.”

Fuck me. Another riot. More later.

(attachment: Rothstein-Remmy.zip)