Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories (16 page)

S
TOCKINGS

H
enry Dobbins was a good man, and a superb soldier, but sophistication was not his strong suit. The ironies went beyond him. In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot but always plodding along, always there when you needed him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor. Like his country, too, Dobbins was drawn toward sentimentality.

Even now, twenty years later, I can see him wrapping his girlfriend’s pantyhose around his neck before heading out on ambush.

It was his one eccentricity. The pantyhose, he said, had the properties of a good-luck charm. He liked putting his nose into the nylon and breathing in the scent of his girlfriend’s body; he liked the memories this inspired, he sometimes slept with the stockings up against his face, the way an infant sleeps with a magic blanket, secure and peaceful. More than anything, though, the stockings were a talisman for him. They kept him safe. They gave access to a spiritual world, where things were soft and intimate, a place where he might someday take his girlfriend to live. Like many of us in Vietnam, Dobbins felt the pull of superstition, and he believed firmly and absolutely in the protective power of the stockings. They were like body armor, he thought. Whenever we saddled up for a late-night ambush, putting on our helmets and flak jackets, Henry Dobbins would make a ritual out of arranging the nylons around his neck, carefully tying a knot, draping the two leg sections over his left shoulder. There were some jokes, of course, but we came to appreciate the mystery of it all. Dobbins was invulnerable. Never wounded, never a scratch. In August, he tripped a Bouncing Betty, which failed to detonate. And a week later he got caught in the open during a fierce little firefight, no cover at all, but he just slipped the pantyhose over his nose and breathed deep and let the magic do its work.

It turned us into a platoon of believers. You don’t dispute facts.

But then, near the end of October, his girlfriend dumped him. It was a hard blow. Dobbins went quiet for a while, staring down at her letter, then after a time he took out the stockings and tied them around his neck as a comforter.

“No sweat,” he said. “I still love her. The magic doesn’t go away.”

It was a relief for all of us.

T
HE
H
URRICANE
R
IDE

I
n salt air and bright light, I watched my aunt revolve. Centrifugal force pressed her ample flesh against a padded wall. She screamed as the floor dropped slowly away, lipstick staining her teeth. But she stuck to the wall as if charged with static, and along with others, didn’t fall. She was dressed in checks and dangling shoes, her black handbag clinging to her hip. The Hurricane Ride gathered speed. My aunt was hurtling, blurred. Her mouth became a long dark line. Her delirious eyes were multiplied.

Checks and flesh turned diaphanous, her plump arms, gartered thighs. Her face dissolved, a trace of rouge.

I swore I saw through her for the rest of the day, despite her bulk and constant chatter, to the sea heaving beyond the boardwalk, tide absconding with the sand, waves cooling the last of light. Even as we left, I saw the clam-shell ticket stand, the ornate seahorse gate, through the vast glass of my aunt.

When does speed exceed the ability of our eyes to arrest and believe? If the axial rotation of the earth is 1,038 miles per hour, why does our planet look languid from space, as bejeweled as my aunt’s favorite brooch? Photographs of our galaxy, careening through the universe at over a million miles per hour, aren’t even as blurred as the local bus.

Momentum. Inertia. Gravity. Numbers and theories barrel beyond me. It’s clear that people disappear, and things, and thoughts. Earth. Aunt. Hurricane. Those words were written with the wish to keep them still. But they travel toward you at the speed of light. They are on the verge of vanishing.

A
M
OMENT
I
N
T
HE
S
UN
F
IELD

H
ansen’s twelfth birthday, after one of Bobby’s mom’s hamburger suppers, Mike Pasqui came over to Bobby’s house and the two of them talked Bobby’s dad into playing some 500 with them. Dad grumbled a little—he always did—but he grabbed the bat and ball from the back porch and headed for the back yard with Mytzi, Bobby’s muttzy dog, yapping behind—and he always did that, too.

Mike and Bobby took the field first, and Dad hit balls to them.

A caught fly ball earned Bobby 100 points. A grounder played on one bounce earned Mike 75. A flubbed grounder—a two-bouncer—stole 50 points back from Mike. And on it went into the evening. When one of the players earned 500 points, he took the bat until someone else got 500. Mike didn’t do much batting, which was okay with him. He just liked being a part of the game. And since Dad preferred to bat, after a while he decided to do all the batting no matter who scored how many points. And that was okay with everyone, too.

Pretty soon, Bobby had 1,075 points, and Mike had around 300 (he had stopped counting), and Dad was swinging and smacking the ball and even joking around a little bit.

It wasn’t too long and the shadow of the house slid up on Dad, slid over him, and stretched for the horizon, which it would reach, Bobby knew, the moment the sun disappeared below the opposite horizon. It would be a shadow hundreds of miles long, millions of miles long, and Bobby sometimes wondered if that was what night really was, all the shadows of all the houses and all the dads and all the kids playing 500 stretched out and added together.

Dad tossed the ball into the air in front of him and popped a fly out of the shadow and into the sunlight. The sun splashed onto one side of the ball, splashed it cool and white against the cool and darkening sky. The ball spun, and began to fall, and Bobby positioned himself under it, held his glove out not for a whole ball, but just a piece of one, because it looked like just a piece of one, a slice of ball, the slice splashed extra white in the high sunlight.

Bobby waited for that little bit of ball to come down, and suddenly he understood the moon.

T
HE
P
HILOSOPHICAL
C
OBBLER

T
he grandfather of General (later President) Ulysses S. Grant tanned hides and cobbled shoes in Pilgrim County. Neighbors knew him simply as Noah Grant, the close-tongued man to whom you took your skins for curing, from whom you bought your moccasins, or, if well-to-do, your boots.

For a long time no one expected him to become the father, let alone grandfather, of anybody. He was too sparing of words ever to put together a speech long enough to qualify as a marriage proposal. Contrary to the predictions of Roma’s gossips, however, he did marry. In due time he fathered a son, Jesse, who fathered a son, Ulysses, who helped lead a multitude of other sons, both Union and Confederate, into premature graves.

Although he lived by tanning the hides of murdered animals, Noah did not like killing, and never fired a gun. Skins heaped all around him while he worked: bear, otter, marten, deer, the reeking wildcat and fox, panther and wolf, the sumptuous mink. The animal kingdom seemed to have shed its collective coat in his tanning shack. The longer he worked among hides, the more silent he became, as if the tannic acid were curing him of speech. Dumb beast among dumb beasts, the neighbors said.

In his silence, Noah never left off musing. Perhaps a way could be found to skin the animals without killing them, as sheep were sheared for their wool? Perhaps the deer and panthers could be bred so that each animal would bear a dozen thicknesses of skin, and thus fewer need be killed? Or maybe some vegetable could be trained to produce fur instead of fruit? Noah became, in short, a philosopher.

While his knife scraped fat from a raccoon skin, or his needle pierced the hide of an otter, he contemplated the world’s secret equations: nine bearskins would buy you a rifle, forty-three would buy a horse; between eighty-five and one hundred deer would get you a yoke of oxen; mink was worth about the same, inch per inch, as calico; for one muskrat you could get stinking drunk on rye whiskey, and for a panther you could stay that way a week. There was occult meaning in these equations. If you thought about them long enough, the grandfather of U. S. Grant was persuaded, you could deduce the paths of stars and the causes of war.

C
ORNERS

M
ildred and Jessie were elected to inspect Marie’s remains before the public viewing. Mildred got to go because she was the oldest, and Jessie because she had come the farthest. The other siblings had gotten to pick out the casket and the dress their sister, Marie, would wear.

The undertaker, a former high-school classmate, showed them solemnly into the parlor. “I think you’ll be pleased,” he said as he lifted the casket lid and stepped back.

Jessie felt a familiar tug of pity for him, like the one she’d feel when she’d encounter him in school the day after she and her sisters had been making fun of him the night before.

“She looks wonderful, Tom,” Mildred said. “You’ve done a good job. What do you think, Jessie?”

Jessie was crying, sobbing from the shock of seeing Marie dead and hearing Mildred and Tom discussing her body as if it were a float they were preparing for the Fourth of July parade.

Mildred put an arm around her. “There, there, Jessie,” she soothed. “We keep forgetting you weren’t here for Marie’s last year. If you had been, you’d understand. None of us want Marie dead but none of us wanted her to go on suffering.”

“She doesn’t have to be smiling,” Jessie sobbed. She turned on Tom. “Why did you put that silly smile on her face?” she demanded.

Tom’s face panicked. “You don’t like it?” he asked. His eyes sought Mildred’s for confirmation.

“If Jessie doesn’t like it,” Mildred said, “then I guess you’d better change it.”

“What do you mean, change it?” Jessie asked. “You can’t change something like that!”

Tom reached over. He took the index finger of his right hand and tugged down on one corner of Marie’s mouth which responded as if it were made of soft, malleable clay. Tom stuck his finger in the other corner of Marie’s mouth and tugged down again. He stepped back. “How’s that?” he asked. “Is that better?”