Gutshot (3 page)

Each day at work, he stood at the counter and observed a large map of North America, which hung over the desk where folks filled out their change-of-address forms. Time passed and William began taking a daily visual interest in the Northwest Territories, which jutted down like a thumb holding Canada in its confident grasp. He imagined it as a pleasantly desolate place. On smoke breaks, he washed out his soda bottle in the bathroom sink.

One day, a woman with a wind-chapped face approached his desk. Her right arm was wrapped in a sterile bandage and she held a plastic cat carrier under her left. “What’s the lark,” she said.

“Beg pardon?” William said, raising the bottle to his lips.

She horked up a little something of her own. Her shoulders seemed to be coated with a thin paste. “What’s the lark, what is the lark,” she said.

“The lark?”

“The lark the lark,” she said, inserting a fingernail under the wrapped bandage to scratch a spot.

“First-class stamps cost forty-nine cents apiece,” William said. He was halfway through the sentence before he was overcome and had to grip the countertop to complete it as the bile rose. “We have some with birds on them, but I’m not sure the skylark is featured.”

She hefted the cat carrier onto the counter. It registered just over thirteen pounds on the metered scale. Inside the carrier, an orange tabby let out a low warning growl. William couldn’t see for certain, but it appeared as if the animal was missing all four of its legs.

“The
loork
, the lark lark the lark lake lurk lark,” the woman said. She spoke with a reasonable cadence, as if she was asking about shipping rates to the Northwest Territories. William wondered briefly if perhaps she was indeed asking about shipping rates to the Northwest Territories and that his brain had transformed a reasonable question into the garble he now discerned, that he had finally lost his mind and would only hear phrases such as this until the merciful end. The cat rolled onto its side, moaning.

“Rates really depend on what you’re sending,” he said. He spit into the bottle and pulled a kerchief from his pocket to wipe a pearly line of drool. “If you’re considering dispatching your cat, you should know that the only living thing that may be shipped via air transportation by the USPS is the queen honeybee, and that’s quite an expense indeed, particularly internationally.”

He had never spoken so many words in an uninterrupted spurt. A coworker looked up from behind a stack of packages. For one wild moment, William was unaffected, but before he could truly appreciate that potential, he felt it welling. He gripped the counter for support, reaching blindly for the bin. His hand found an open box and he brought it to his face before the torrent unleashed.

Customers stopped their talk to watch. His coworker covered her mouth with both hands. The material soaked the box and splashed back on his shirtfront. In it, he detected the odor of his mother’s warm milk. The lark woman brayed with laughter.

William experienced the same absence of thought he always felt during the act. But because this episode lasted so much longer than usual, he found he could go further within it. He saw its bleak topography, an underwater mountain range, which revealed itself in waves of alternating anxiety and calm, the waves themselves muted and consumed. At the end, there was none of the clenched jaw and turning away that he usually felt. William realized his true freedom against the grip of time.

He saw that his unwitting target had been a box of bulk postage and he now held hundreds, if not thousands, of ruined stamps, stuck to the cardboard and each other. The box was heavy and warming at a pace that matched his rising guilt at the destruction of federal property.

The lark woman’s laugh calmed to a few odd snorts. She swayed, smiling. Everyone else remained shocked beyond movement. William and the woman leaned toward each other like an old couple over a kitchen table.

“Have you ever been to Canada?” he asked.

She nodded vigorously. When she saw he was about to be sick again, she reached for him. He had a vision of her hair matted by a corona of dark ice as he readied himself to fill her cupped hands.

People of the Bay

The poet brought his people to the bay and waved for them to quiet. When they did, he said, “Build our city with wood.”

The people of the bay—for they were now people of the bay—took in a shared breath. “The wood will warp and split,” they said. “Our city quakes.” The ground rolled a little to confirm the fact.

The poet parted the crowd to approach the loudest man, a worker who had raised his voice out of a professional concern. The poet clapped his hands on the man’s shoulders. “Raise high the cathedral walls with oak and pine,” said the poet. “Make a church that becomes an ark when turned.”

And so the people built the city with wood they found in the flats nearby. They built palafittes and schoolhouses and shops and a great towering wooden sanctuary. Before they had even finished these projects, the wood had already begun to split as the builder had foretold.

The poet arrived and regarded the project. He wrote something on a scroll and tucked it behind the piano, which had just been delivered on a boat. Once he was gone, the people dug out the scroll.

“Load the ark with men and women and set it to sail,” someone read aloud. The people shrugged and placed the scroll back behind the piano. The earth quaked and rocked the piano, wedging it at an angle against the wall that rendered it unplayable.

Walking down the narrow road, scrolls tucked under his arm, the poet looked more like a student heading to the classroom. He arrived at the waterside and observed the palafittes. “Paint our city in blue and yellow,” he said to the women setting up the bread for the morning. “Paint it to face the sun and sky, paint it to greet the bay.”

The women set their mouths, but the poet remained, standing with his hands on his hips, until they took up brushes and buckets and began the slow task of painting the warping walls.

“Paint the beams thick so that when the earth quakes it gets a mouthful of lead,” the poet called out. They shooed him away. The women slopped on another coat of paint and when it dried, they repeated the process, painting so thick that the houses lost their corners.

When the poet reached the square, everyone gathered to listen. He cleared his throat and strutted haltingly across the sidewalk, looking rather like a fawn taking its first delicate steps. “Gird our quaking city with wooden beams,” he cried out, his sweet voice curling through the morning air.

A murmur went up among them. “They won’t hold,” one said. “We’ll die in our beds,” shouted another. “You’ll kill us!”

The poet threw back his head and looked at them one by one, his steady gaze conveying the fire in his heart. The people picked up their tools and obeyed. Underneath them all, the earth waited.

On a Pleasant Afternoon, Every Battle Is Recalled

A man should know how to butcher his own bird. Preparing my Sunday supper is a habit in which I take singular pleasure, a responsibility the women give me gladly. I sit through the last half hour of service tapping the hatters’ plush of my topper in anticipation of scraping pin feathers. And then home, where sweet Julia has laid out my chambray and apron, where the women have scrubbed and prepared the bucket and stool behind the kitchen and placed a cigar and a short bottle of rye by the fresh-killed bird. The weather is crisp and warming. The women of the White House kitchen grumble that it does not befit my station, but they learn that with power comes the ability to choose one’s own path.

The idea for my Sunday ritual was Julia’s. She knew I missed the pleasures of war and felt muddled in my new position. One night, she had a memorable dream in which I was severing the feet from a fat hen. In the dream, the hen’s yellow claws pinched a scroll upon which were written the words
ULYSSES GRANT, THE FINEST PRESIDENT
. On waking, she rushed to my chamber and sat shivering at the foot of the bed while she told the tale. Her right eye crossed handsomely whenever her spirit was roused, and at that moment was so askew it appeared as if one eye watched the antechamber for an intruder as the other fixed upon me. I was reminded of the day I first met her, after service, her arms laden with stemmed dandelion flowers she had pulled from a patch beside the road. I said How do you do, and an errant bee stung her sweet armflesh and she dropped the weeds, screeching, wild eyes skewed, a devil woman before me, and I knew I would make her mine.

What measures can a man take to ensure control over his own experience? It was a question I often pondered on behalf of the soldiers under my watch. On behalf of them, to be clear, because they themselves were so filthy in the fields of Vicksburg and Appomattox that it was as if the sludge had entered their brains through the ears. I would treat them to fried oysters for breakfast and fresh coffee without the cut of chicory. We were all easily pleased in those days, and though there was no liquor I count that time among the happiest of my life.

I cut my cigar with the beak knife and twist off the bird’s head. Its crop follows, stuffed with feed, and the gizzard, which I baptize with a splash of rye. The neck is reserved for broth. The oil gland slides free with a flick of the blade. I sing old battle songs while I work: one of a vacant chair by the fireside, another of the glory of emancipation. The viscera fall from the slit pouch, my empty bottle is replaced. The bird’s heart, the size of my thumb, is reserved for the cats.

Satisfied with the process, I alert the women to the pile and take my leave to dress for supper. The window from my chamber affords a view of the new trees propped up with gardener’s stakes on the lawn. I drag over a chair and enjoy a fresh glass as the sun shines over my property, my territory, my nation. By the time the meal arrives, the bird and I barely recognize each other.

Monument

The townspeople met at the graveyard at the agreed-upon time. They brought bottles of vinegar for the weeds and pails of water and rags and soaps. A gardener hauled in a truck bed of hardy plants, one lady had flowers tucked in a laundry basket, and a few of the men brought shovels to even out the earth around the yard’s only tree. Someone started up a lawnmower.

Without much conversation, they got to work. They scrubbed gravestones until the names gleamed. The lawnmower sputtered to life and its owner began to trace the site’s perimeter. A man gathered faded silk flowers in a trash bag. The children held smaller pails and cups of water and cleaned out the stones’ grooved details with their fingers.

Each person gave their unspoken thoughts of respect to the graves they cleaned. These were the resting places of their friends and neighbors. Even those long dead had left generations in witness. Most worked in silence. An old man took a break from cleaning his wife’s stone to wipe his eyes with a handkerchief. Someone whistled a hymn.

Work around the tree was going well. Its roots had disturbed the ground and the area needed to be smoothed and resodded. An usher at the church swung a shovel full of peat a little farther back than he had intended. The shovel clipped a gravestone and sent a piece of the stone flying into the high grass.

The sound rang out across the field, a light metal
ping
, and stopped the crowd. People looked to see what happened. A few dropped their things and came closer. Wiping their foreheads on their sleeves, they regarded the stone.

It was the grave of an upstanding member of the community, a woman who had been well loved when she died. Most of her kin were in attendance, and her young grandchildren played a spirited game of hide-and-seek around the graves. The man who had swung the shovel looked at each of them in turn.

The woman’s eldest son stepped forward to inspect the damage. He ran his finger along the stone at its sheared point. The granite wasn’t very old, but its surface had dulled after years of rain and sun. His mother’s name was still clearly marked, and the grooves were rimmed with grime. A line of earth clung where the shovel had struck, and the stone that chipped off had given way to the mica sparkling inside. He laid an open palm on the place. The split portion, cool and freshly exposed to the afternoon sun, seemed tender to the touch.

When he lifted his shovel, the crowd took a step back. He swung it like an ax onto the gravestone, landing heavy and breaking off a larger piece. He leaned forward and touched the place again. It was so fresh it looked wet, as if a vein of springwater spread through it. Again he lifted the shovel.

The townspeople stood, watching the man’s destructive work. After a few minutes, one of the women leaned down and put her full weight against a brittle stone. It fell, splitting cleanly in two, and she covered it with fistfuls of earth. An old man took a shovel to his sister’s memorial, lopping off the delicate angel’s head that crowned it. He scrambled after the head, scooped it up, and threw it with surprising strength over the far fence.

The crowd sprang to action. Children gouged limestone with their trowels. Someone went back to his truck for a baseball bat. A woman beat her husband’s stone with her fists until she was pulled away and given a pickax. They worked in this way until nothing remained.

Two

Western Passage

I knew that man was trouble. He hefted a duffel above his shoulder without seeming to register its size, rubbing his body across each seat he passed. The people behind him had to stop and set down their things, waiting for him to finish fondling the headrests. He was dressed like a young guy but had the white pocked skin of a man nearing middle age. When he smiled at me, I held my gaze one inch into his eyes, not at but in, where he might register my personal wall. This trick took thirty years to master. From there, we had an understanding.