Authors: Aaron Gwyn
Dog on the Cross (21 page)
When he went downstairs, Casteel was standing at the front desk talking with the dispatch. The sheriff held a large brown envelope, and seeing Martin, he began to motion him over.
“Lab report just came in,” he said. “Those prints don't belong to Hollis or anybody else they've arrested in Oklahoma in the last forty-five years.”
Martin felt as if he were going to be ill.
“That doesn't necessarily mean anything,” Casteel told him. “I'm sure he's smart enough to've worn gloves. We don't have to have the prints to convict him of aggravated assault and resisting arrest.”
The sheriff raised his coffee mug and took a long drink.
Watching him, his face drained of color, Martin told the man he'd be back in a moment. He went out to his car, dug around the front seat, and found the cup he'd accidentally taken from church the night before. Carrying it inside, he pitched it to Casteel.
“What's this?” the man asked, studying the flattened piece of Styrofoam. “You feeling okay?”
Martin didn't answer. He walked down the hallway and into the bathroom. Even the sheriff, deaf as he was, had no trouble hearing the sound the bolt made when the deputy shot it to behind him.
S
EVERAL WEEKS LATER,
Jacob Hollis pleaded guilty to assault charges and paid fifty-seven hundred dollars in fines. He sold his home to a Dutch family at the end of summer and, much to the liking of the First Pentecostal, moved back to New England. Hollis didn't appear in court for the civil suit filed against him by Doyle Withers, and Judge Petersen issued a bench warrant should the man come back through Oklahoma. He told Withers, however, not to hold his breath. The judge didn't expect Hollis would be eager to revisit the state.
It was also along this time that the church brought its camp meeting to an end. The revival, said the elders of the congregation, was the longest they'd heard of, services every day for two and a half months.
Leslie Snodgrass and his grandmother moved out of their hotel room and went back to the even smaller town outside Tishomingo. When the United Pentecostal Board of Churches sent in a new pastor, a Virginian by the name of Don Shockley, Mrs. Snodgrass wrote a letter of protest to the UPBC chairman. She had hoped her grandson could apply for the post and felt he hadn't been given proper consideration. Hearing of the letter, Reverend Shockley phoned to see if the boy would be interested in preaching the next summer. The woman told him she would think about it.
Gerald Martin found himself in the process of moving as well. In December of that year, he resigned the office of deputy sheriff and took a position as fire watcher in central Colorado. Standing on the balcony of his tower and looking out over the miles of evergreen, he could, at times, convince himself he'd made the right decision. The foothills of the Rocky Mountains lay on the horizon, and the air was clean and crisp. But every evening, as the sun declined and stained the western windows, Martin felt that a hollowness had grown inside him, and while eager for companionship, he didn't know if he could return to suburban or even rural life. He thought he must be looking for a different community altogether.
The day he'd resigned, Casteel had wanted to know why he was losing his best deputy, why, in his
opinion, Martin was throwing away a promising career in law enforcement. The wide receiver for the football team had been missing since the end of summerâCasteel might need assistance with thatâand, after all, didn't Martin understand he had an opportunity to be sheriff himself in a few years? The deputy simply shook his head in answer to such questions, but when Casteel wanted to know who it was had handed him that Styrofoam cup, Martin told him flatly that he didn't remember. The sheriff attempted to jog his memory, using as incentive the fact that the prints on the cup had proven a perfect match with the ones on the nails. Martin said he'd like to help, but it seemed such a trivial thing at the time, there was no way he was going to recall it.
Casteel merely shrugged. He was just glad Hollis was no longer his problem. “Let those Easterners deal with him,” he told Martin. “They're used to nuts like that. It's so bad out there, they can't tell the priests from the perverts.” Martin said the perverts were better received.
But his flippancy aside, this was the type of concern that Martin devoted an increasing amount of thought to. For much of his life, he'd had an unwavering sense of right and wrongâtheir origin, what distinguished them, the things on which they fed. He'd chosen to think that evil arose from without, that only the man who entertained it was in any real
danger. Now it was otherwise with Martin, and while he understood that to some this might be an epiphany that fostered tolerance and wisdom, the former deputy simply felt unbalanced by the realization, as if one of the legs of his tower had been sawed away and the structure was subject to collapse.
Lying on his cot at night, he would sometimes dream of the old woman. He would not see her as she'd been in life, but rather as something fantastical, a figure gnarled and distorted, a fairy-book crone. Stalking the hills in her gingham dress, a gunny-sack hoisted over one shoulder, she'd move beneath the oak limbs with a face that admitted no cruelty, no hatred or malice, stopping at times to reach into the sack and assure the whimpering thing that flailed inside it. Most nights, she would perform her duties alone, holding firmly the muzzle as she applied strips of duct tape, grasping the torso as she drove the nails. But there were others when Martin would find himself standing beside herâhelping the woman, to the best of his ability, carry out her task. Sometimes words of comfort would escape her lips, but Martin could never quite catch them, and he knew that in any case, they were not for him.
Awakening from these dreams, he might think for a moment he could hear something knocking against the legs of his tower, scratching at the support beams. He would stumble to the balcony and peer over the
ledge, wishing to see some beast he could draw aim on with the pistol he continued to keep with him. But the sounds proved only the wind in the treetops, their branches thrashing below him, no monsters visible in that sea of black.
I
WOULD LIKE TO
extend my sincere appreciation to my agent, Nat Sobel, and my editor, Kathy Pories, for all their guidance. Thanks also to my grandparents, Ruth and Jerry Martin, without whose love and support I never would have made it; to Dr. Robert Hill, who started me on this path (whether he'll own up to it or not); and to my friends Mark Walling and Clint Stewart, readers extraordinaire, whose comments on the manuscript kept me honest and whose friendship kept me sane. “The Offering” is in tribute to the remarkable Susan Tyler, who, unlike the protagonist of my story, continues to astonish family and friends with her courage, strength, and wisdom.
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014
© 2004 by Aaron Gwyn. All rights reserved.
Portions of this book have appeared in slightly different versions in the following publications: “Of Falling” and “Dog on the Cross,”
Louisiana Literature;
“Truck,”
Black Warrior Review;
“In Tongues,”
American Literary Review;
“The Backsliders” and “Offering,”
Glimmer Train;
and “Courtship,”
Texas Review.
“Of Falling” was reprinted in
New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2002.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. No reference to any real person is intended or should be inferred.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.
E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-725-8
We hope you enjoy this special preview of Rebecca Lee's forthcoming short story collection
Bobcat and Other Stories
, available in print and e-book formats wherever books are sold in June 2013.
FROM
Bobcat and Other Stories
BY REBECCA LEE
I
t was the terrine that got to me. I felt queasy enough that I had to sit in the living room and narrate to my husband what was the brutal list of tasks that would result in a terrine: devein, declaw, decimate the sea and other animals, eventually emulsifying them into a paste, which could then be riven with whole vegetables. It was like describing to somebody how to paint a Monet, how to turn the beauty of the earth into a blurry, intoxicating swirl, like something seen through the eyes of the dying. Since we were such disorganized hosts, we were doing a recipe from
Food and Wine
called the quick-start terrine. A terrine rightfully should be made over the course of two or three days â heated, cooled, flagellated, changed over time in the flames of the ever-turning world â but our guests were due to arrive within the hour.
Of the evening's guests, I was most worried about the Donner-Nilsons, whom my husband called the Donner-Blitzens. I had invited them about a month ago, before it had begun to dawn on me that one-half of the couple â
Ray Nilson â was having an affair with a paralegal at work, a paralegal so beautiful it was hard to form any other opinions of her. I suppose Ray felt in her presence something that seemed to him so original that he had to pay attention even if he had a wife and a small baby at home.
My friend Lizbet was also coming, and I had filled her in on the situation, making her promise that she would reveal nothing at the dinner, even with her eyes. “My eyes?” she had said, innocently. Lizbet was so irrepressible that I could imagine her raising her eyebrows very slowly for Ray's wife, darting them suddenly over to Ray.
Watch out!
Lizbet was the person who had introduced me to my husband, John. She and I had been children together, and then during the years I was getting a law degree at
NYU
, she and John had been writing students together in the state of Iowa.
Th
is fall, ten years after they'd graduated, both had novels being published. Lizbet's was about the search for the lost Gnostic Gospel texts, and the book was already, prepublication, being marketed as the thinking woman's
Da Vinci Code.
My husband's book was a novel about a war correspondent traumatized in some made-up Middle Eastern country that sounded a lot like Iran but was named Burmar in the book.
Truthfully, I was not pleased with his book. I had just finished reading it for the first time, in galleys, and within the first forty pages, the protagonist had slept with three women, none of whom even remotely resembled me â one was an aging countess, another a Midwestern farm-girl
TV
journalist, and then the narrator's true love was a sexy Burmarian/Iranian waif named Zita.
“Who is Zita?” I had asked him early this afternoon. I was hovering over a roast, trying to figure out how to tie it for the oven.
“She's nobody,” he said. He was carrying into our apartment bags of groceries and he leaned over to kiss my cheek.
“Who is she, though?”
“She's a fictional character.”
“Do you think our unborn child will one day want to read about your sexual fantasies of other women in war zones?”
“Wait,” he said. His head was cocked to the side, as it was when he felt confused or hurt, and wanted to explain something. He looked innocent, yet interested. “First,” he said, “there is no Zita. Second, the protagonist in the book is not me.”
“Zita is Frances,” I said. It was absurd, I knew. Frances was Frances Sofitel, his book editor, who was also due to show up at our house in a few hours for this dinner party, a woman as unlike a waif as humanly possible. She was tall and very angular, and spoke with an authoritative baritone, and seemed always properly amused by all the underlings around her. As well, she actually managed to make quite a bit of money as an editor, partly by digging in the muck a little, a celebrity bio here, a porn star's memoir there, just a little bit on the side to allow her to publish what she considered her heart and soul, books like my husband's literary thriller and paean to women who weren't his wife.
She and my husband had what I thought was an overly intimate connection. I didn't really like to see them together.
Th
ey actually talked about language itself a lot. Just words and puns and little synonyms and such.
Th
is was completely dull to me, which in addition to my jealousy was a terrible combination. For instance, we would all be out to dinner, and one of them would dig out a little piece of paper so they could play an acrostic, or dream a little about sentences that were the same backwards as forwards. For my husband, words were fascinating â their origins and mutations, their ability to combine intricately. When somebody would say something in an economical way, and use grammar originally to some satisfying end, he would usually repeat it to me at the end of the day. It stayed in his mind, like a song or a painting he loved. I did feel he would be a very good father, partially for this reason, as I could already picture him crouched over the baby, listening, rapt, waiting for the words to come in.
“Zita is not Frances, nor is she any woman,” he said. “It's fiction.”
“You spend all your time writing, so we'd have to say that those women take up the lion's share of your time â they are your significant others.”
“Well, then, we'd have to say that Duong Tran is your significant other,” John said. Duong Tran was a Hmong immigrant who had refused to give his dying wife treatment for her heart condition on account of the medication being, according to Duong, Western voodoo and not ordained by the many gods who'd traveled alongside them from Laos to New York City in July 2001. I was his lawyer.
Th
e argument devolved from there. Certain themes got repeated â
John's intense solitude, my long hours, his initial resistance to commitment, my later resistance to marriage, and then at some point the reasons were left behind and we were in that state of pure, extrarational opposition.
Our argument was both constrained and exacerbated by the fact that I was pregnant and had read that high levels of cortisol in a troubled mother can cross the placenta and not only stress out the baby in utero but for
the rest of its life
. As well, there was a deadline; our dinner party was set to begin. People were soon going to be out in the streets and on the subway, making their way to our apartment.
Th
ey wouldn't want to picture their hostess like this â emotional, insecure, lashing out at her husband. You want the hostess to be serene, the apartment a set of glowing rooms awaiting you, quiet music pouring out of its walls, the food making its way through various complex stages in the kitchen â the slow broiling fig sauce, the buns in the warming oven, the pudding forming its subtle skin in the chill of the refrigerator.
FromÂ
BOBCAT AND OTHER STORIES
(c) 2013 by Rebecca Lee. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-61620-173-9
On Sale June 2013