Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction (2 page)

They blocked my path.

“Weeellll, weeellll, whadda we got here?” That was Floyd J. Davis, M.D., M.Sc., F.A.A.O. He was in his late fifties, about fifteen years older than me.

His sidekick was Daniel Kupperman, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.A.O. He was about seventy and looked as though he had grown more evil every single year.

“You’re that fancy-pants optometrist next to the chicken place,” said Kupperman. Cruel eyes danced behind his thick glasses.

“Yes, Dr. Albert Pope,” I said.

Quietly.

Looking at the ground.

“I run Westegg Optical, pleasetomeetyou…” My mumbled greetings were interrupted by their horse laughs.

“An op-
tom
-e-trist!” Davis sneered. “Well, Danny, you and I are oph-thal-mol-o-gists!” He made a meal of those words. “Optometrist. Ophthalmologist. They sound sooooo much alike. What could the difference
possibly
be?”

Stepping up to my face, Kupperman hissed, “Well, for starters, remember the p-h-t-h spelling, fat boy. It comes from
ophthalmos,
the ancient Greek for eye. And what does
optometrist
mean in Greek?”

“It’s
opsis
, meaning sight, and
metron,
meaning measurement,” I said.

“Nah! It means
chucklehead
!
Optometrist
is Greek for
chucklehead!
Say it!”

“OptometristisGreekforchucklehead…” I muttered fearfully.

Davis stepped up alongside his henchman. He breathed Chick-N-Rite Clucker’s Choice Coffee fumes in my face. “And
we
went to medical school,” he hissed. “Where did
you
go?

“I went to an accredited four-year school of optometry,” I said. “Sir.”

“Oooh, four years! You hear that, Danny?”

“I heard Floyd, I heard.”

“We did four-year undergrad degrees in science, four years in medical school, three years in residency—”

“—
residency
means
training
, chucklehead!”

“—I got this, Floyd! Three years residency, and one to two years of fellowship. Fellowship is
more
training, chucklehead!
And
we take state boards
and
become Fellows of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.” He pounded the F.A.A.O. on his white coat.

A wad of Davis’s spit landed on my trembling face.

“And what does an
optometrist
do?” he said. “Aside from
pound sand twenty-four hours a day? Why, you go to school to learn,” he switched to a high-pitched, lisping voice, “which lookth clearer, number three or number four? Number three? Okay, which lookth clearer now, number five or number thikth?” He twirled his left wrist limply.

Kupperman pushed me down into a mud puddle, soaking my trousers.

“I-I-I can diagnose glaucoma!” I wailed. I was interrupted by two hyena laughs. “And refer my patients to—”

“—a
real
doctor!” Davis hooted.

“Glaucoma, huh?” Kupperman said. “Hey, Floyd, when I was on ER duty yesterday, I took 17 pieces of glass out of some construction worker’s eyes. But heck, what’s that compared to diagnosing glaucoma?” He broke up laughing at his own “joke.”

Davis pulled a Chick-N-Rite Chicka-Chicka-Cherry-Pie™ from his paper bag. He unwrapped it and dipped it in the mud.

“I think since chucklehead here is so hungry for knowledge, he needs some cherry pie, don’t you, Danny?”

“Yeah! Yeah! Make ‘im eat it!”

I protested feebly as the filthy, sodium-rich dessert was mashed into my face.

It was woman troubles that led to their downfall: some tramp Davis was having a fling with.

She would hang around with them in the parking lot, passing a paper bag filled with hooch back and forth, listening to Puccini blaring from Kupperman’s parked Volvo.

She was the chief budget officer for the county government: typical trash you get in your neighborhood when an ophthalmic practice moves in.

It turned out Davis was seeing some museum curator on the side. When the budget babe heard about it, there was a big fight in the parking lot. I watched from my shop doorway.

She screamed at him, saying he had a two-inch…er…
endowment
and that he’d gone to a state medical school instead of an Ivy League institution; the usual street insults.

Kupperman, alongside Davis, said, “You need to calm your little CPA self down, missy!”

That sent her over the edge. She clawed at both their faces, succeeding in knocking their glasses off. She stomped their spectacles to pieces in her rage. Then she left in a huff.

Davis and Kupperman looked down at their mangled glasses, glinting in the late-morning sun. Then, slowly, they turned their heads to look at me.

I stood up straight.

I folded my arms.

I waited.

Squinting heavily, they slowly walked up to me. Their faces were filled with dread. When they got to within a few feet of me, they paused.

I stood aside and made a flourish with my arm, bidding them to enter.

They walked into my shop, their eyes cast down.

“Boys?”

They stopped in their tracks.

“You asked once what the difference was between an optometrist and an ophthalmologist?”

They waited, scarcely breathing.

“The difference is, an optometrist…has a heart!”

Corey Mertes

T
he old man with one arm sat at the end of the hotel bar and ordered another drink.

“Another beer,” he muttered.

“Another?” the bartender asked, before bringing the man his twenty-third.

The man had been sitting on the stool without moving for twelve hours and was turning the color of Strega. He liked Strega. He liked it a hell of a lot. The man’s tastes were not typical. He liked Strega and grappa and mescal, and he liked the smell of bull under the hot sun of an open arena. He liked a lot of things. But not beer. Today he had to drink twenty-five beers without moving from his stool to satisfy a bet he’d lost to the one-armed face-punching champion of San Baques. It was a damn stupid bet.

The old man ordered a plate of
nachos,
a Mexican soup, and a well-cleaned plaice.
Nachos
were what the Spanish ordered when they wanted chips they could put cheese on. He liked them. He liked them a hell of a lot. He liked things you could put cheese on and forget about. You couldn’t put cheese on beer without messing up the head.

“Another beer,” he murmured.

I must finish two more beers without bursting, the man thought. He remembered past bets worse than this one he had made with other people under different circumstances in distant places at other times. Once on the Place au Coin de la Rue he had lost a three-legged race to an obelisk maker. He made the biggest obelisks the old man had ever seen, and God knows he’d seen some big ones in Florence!

Another time, to satisfy a debt, he’d fought a dingo at night in the outback west of Brisbane with Aborigines watching. That’s how he lost his arm. Earlier, during the war, when the shooting had stopped and the others lay dead, he’d bet he could carry a grenade in his mouth across a magnetic minefield. Those were better times. Five more yards and he would still have teeth.

“Another beer,” he mumbled.

Later came the cliff diving and the sequoia-cutting contest, the ouzo tournament, and the sperm-whale hunts. Then he had to leave the good old country, but it was good. He’d had enough. Now he would finish his twenty-fifth beer and prove he was not a
gynomoco
again. He did not want that. The old man wanted to be one of the
machos. Macho
was what the Spaniards called a man with
cavalero
, which was a quality that showed he embraced the philosophy of
existico. Existico
was what a man believed in when he didn’t take any
guanola
from another man, which is what the other man gave when he had
bigabalsas
. When a man had
bigabalsas
the Spaniards said he could untie the knot of destiny with his teeth, if he had any, and raise the toast of
piswata
with his good arm. Piswata was what the machos drank, and he would have a
piswata
himself, he thought, if he ever finished his fish and his soup and his last true good best true damn beer.

But he could not finish. Instead, he rushed to the men’s room a moment late, ruining along the way the meals of the nearest diners with a trailing stream and flatulent stench of
nachos, macho
, and gazpacho.

“My, my,” the bartender said. “Isn’t it a pity to drink so.” Then he mopped.

M. Garrett Bauman

D
ad was a safety maniac. He was convinced disaster had us in its crosshairs. By the time we were six, he’d taught us that pinworms, ringworm, and tapeworms devour people. During thunderstorms, he’d describe how lightning blasts the roofs off houses. At supper we heard tales of deadly flu, TB, rickets, hemorrhoids, cancer, blindness, and accidents that would leave us amputated, blind, deaf, and drooling.

As a child I ran out the door to avoid a loose slate falling from the roof and decapitating me, and I ran past alleys in case a rabid dog lurked there. Dad lectured us about puncturing our eardrums when cleaning our ears, about becoming “impacted” if we didn’t eat spinach, and about being hit in the head while playing baseball and becoming brain-dead.

So by age nine, I wished he cared a little less. The holidays, especially, seemed to bring him to an even higher state of alert. One Christmas, Dad brought home the usual scrawny New Jersey pine tree and Dad, Mom, my little brother Stevie, and I decorated it with bulbs, balls, and tinsel until the holes were disguised and it sparkled with warmth and joy.

“It looks so pretty!” Mom said.

Dad nodded. “But we have to make sure it’s watered every day and the lights don’t stay on too long.”

“I know,” Mom sighed. “I’m not one of the children.”

“Why can’t we leave it on all day, Dad?” I said. Geez, we get something beautiful, and five minutes later he wants to turn it off.

“You want to know why? I’ll tell you why. Come here.”
He pulled me to the tree, and I knew I shouldn’t have asked. “Here. Touch this bulb.” As I reached my finger out, he barked, “Carefully!” I tapped my forefinger on the hot bulb. “Aha!” he crowed. “Think of it! All that heat—a hundred bulbs pressed against ten thousand dry pine needles. One needle’s just a little too dry or one bulb a tad too hot, the heat builds up. Hour after hour. Hotter and hotter. The needles smoke. Then—poof!” He clapped his hands so I jumped out of my skin and seemed to fly around the ceiling. Dad’s face shone with horrified exhilaration. “The whole tree goes up. Tree resin is like gasoline! A giant ball of fire. Flames licking the ceiling. The whole house will be gone in minutes.”

“Shouldn’t we turn it off?”

“Not yet. I’ll keep an eye on it.” Then he whispered to me, “When I’m at work, you remind your mother to water it to keep it moist. Can you do that?”

“Suppose it catches fire when we’re not looking?”

Dad was pleased that I saw the danger. “You’re right! You’re one hundred percent right! That’s why we’re going to have a family fire drill! Right now. We need an emergency escape plan. Our lives are at stake! Stairway here. Hmm…windows.” His mind clicked. Finally he nodded. “Come on, Stevie. Dot too. We’ll go upstairs to our bedrooms and pretend there’s a big fire down here.”

I was excited. I loved escapes. Dad’s stories were horrible, but there was always a way out.

Mom sighed. “I have supper to start. There’s—”

“No, no, come on. We have to think this out before an emergency happens. Suppose the stove catches on fire?”

“I’d turn it off?” Mom suggested, as he shooed us upstairs.

“Now,” Dad said, “When I yell ‘Fire!’ we’ll see if you boys can open your bedroom window to crawl out on the porch roof,
OK?”

I said, “Why don’t we just run downstairs?”

Dad stared at me like I was an idiot. “Because the hallway will be a sheet of flames. The stairs will be crackling like the pit of hell, and when you step on them, they’ll collapse and you’ll fall into the basement. Burning wood will cover you and sizzle you like a pork rind. That’s why!”