Not Even Inuit Stories   Comments! I like comments. I love comments.
Comments and tiramisu. Not Even Inuit Stories  -by AC Chapin
sdragon@Glue.umd.edu For that first seven seconds, the pillow under her
cheek smelled like cologne, the stuff that comes in the bottle with a
mountain on it. She was all curled around it, and at any moment it would
move and she would feel that uneven press of skinny ribs against her cheek
and she'd move enough to kiss the line of soft hairs trailing down from
the navel. And then the alarm rang again and it was a pillow, cotton
against her cheek and smelling like papaya shampoo and nothing much else.
Just a pillow. And it was time to go to work. Marriage smelled like
cologne and divorce smelled like papaya -- shouldn't so be hard to
remember. This morning the alarm turned out to be the telephone. She
picked it up, her eyes open but unfocused, and slipped it between her ear
and the pillow. The clock resolved into an awful angle; four in the
oh-god. "Whaa?" "Ange?" Too surreal. "Ray?" "I'm sorry. " There was that
low ache in his voice, that 'officer down' baseline all cops know by
heart. At four in the morning, there is only bad news. "Where are you?"
"Never mind. Outside. Go back to sleep." "I'll be down in a minute." Robe.
Slippers. Hairbrush. Oh, why bother? Down the hall, past the door to the
attic. The attic where, in a big cardboard box, were two dozen hardback
fairy-tale books -- Rumplestiltzkin, The Elves and the Shoemaker, Puss in
Boots and so on, and a crowd of fuzzy animals with rattles in their
bellies or bright eyes that opened and closed. All bought in celebration
of a few mornings of merciless nausea and light-headedness. It had turned
out to be the flu. Down the stairs, where family pictures crowded out the
blue twining flowers of the wallpaper. Ray's face appeared by the sixth
step down and was gone by the ninth. When she opened the door he was
standing at the edge of the porch, facing away, the cellular phone still
in his hand; his head was bent down so that he looked grotesque, a
headless body. "Hey, you want in here or what?" It took a moment for him
to come back from wherever he was. She caught the red-brown blotches on
his perfectly cut jacket as he turned around. When he tucked the phone
away she saw the tight Escher tiling of fish and bat and lizard on his
tailored vest, also smeared with drying blood. "Hi, Ange." He had that way
of always trying so hard to be nonchalant with her. "Jesus, Ray. What
happened?" He looked down at himself. "Oh my god." Like he hadn't even
known it was there. It wasn't his; she could tell that now. But somebody
had been bleeding a hell of a lot. "Ray?" The morning air was very cold
and he had left his coat somewhere. He didn't seem to notice, Ray, who
kept the bedroom thermostat between seventy-five and eighty from November
to April. "That's forty-four suits." He muttered strangely. "Okay, Ray.
Okay. Come on." He let her walk him inside, and then stood in the arch
between the front room and the kitchen. "Want some coffee?" He leaned
against the side of the arch, boneless under his ruined, wonderful suit.
"What happened, Ray?" "Fraser's in the hospital." "The Mountie?" Frannie
filled her in on things at the grocery store every week. It was the
Mountie who made Frannie pass reluctantly by the Ben & Jerry's and put
anything with the Hershey's logo back on the shelf. He shot her a look she
recognized; he'd forgotten that she wasn't there anymore to know all his
friends. Not that he'd ever had a whole lot of friends for her to know.
"Yeah, the Mountie." "Is he okay?" Ray stumbled over and sat down at the
kitchen table. "Bullet just grazed his shoulder; he lost a lot of blood
but he should be home by Thursday." It came out flat and simple, as if
he'd rehearsed it, something you learn to do when you're delivering
four-in-the-morning news. She turned her back on him and fumbled in the
breadbox, reaching automatically for the blueberry muffins he liked. Of
course there weren't any; she hadn't baked blueberry muffins for years.
"Fraser, he does this . . . this thing." Ray said quietly. "It's stupid.
Whenever he wants to talk somebody into something he tells them a story."
She turned on the coffee machine and pulled out two mugs. "Like what?"
Don't push, don't ever ever push; that was the first rule she'd learned
with Ray. "Caribou stories, Eskimo fairy tales, I dunno . . . He just, he
tells them these damn stories and it *always* works. Hit men give him
their guns, kids do their homework, saps help him do community service.
It's like hypnosis or something." Yeah, she could guess what sap usually
got taken in by the stories; Ray always was one hell of a soft touch. She
kept her eyes on the coffee as it finally started to drip blackly into the
bottom of the glass pot. "It scares the hell out of me, the way he does
it; I mean, people's lives are usually on the line, usually his." She
caught a glimpse of his angry little smile "Or mine. So day before
yesterday there was this girl out on a ledge -- twelve-year-old cokehead
-- and he talked her down. Just told her this story about a caribou and
she climbed right back inside." Ray stared at his hands. "We were after
her dealer last night. Little rat guy, you know?" She knew.
"Seventeen-year old little rat with a goddam Bulldog .44." "Jesus." "So
we're behind the Riv and the rat's behind a dumpster and Fraser stands up
and starts in on one of these stories, Eskimo grandmothers and tundra and
all this crap. Anybody else woulda pulled him down, but no, these stories
always work, right? So I let him do it." "Ray . . . " Oh yeah, no wonder
he'd come here. Between them, they knew a little something about
unexpected failure. "I let him do it. He's telling the story. He's telling
the story and then . . . " He put his head down on the table. Boiling
coffee made wet popping noises behind her. She took his hand between both
of hers and felt that old perfect fit, his long slender hand folding
around her fingers. "It was like it was impossible, you know? Those damn
stories always work." His voice was muffled. "It looked really bad at
first, all this blood everywhere. I called it in and I tried to hold onto
him, you know, to just, just let him know he wasn't alone, cut the
bleeding down, I dunno. But there was all this blood and he slipped out of
my hands." She moved close and put her arms down over his shoulders. "He
slipped." And then he pressed his face into her robe. So she just stood
there; he always spooked so easy when he was like this. One word and he'd
clam up and run for cover. She stroked his head and shoulders in that old
pattern, feeling the soft prickle of the cropped hair under her hands.
What else was she supposed to do? The whole ex thing got real ugly when
you tried to balance it out. After a minute or two, the clenched muscles
at the back of Ray's neck let go. He looked up at her. There was a scary
feeling of familiarity to the nearness and needing of that emotion-ravaged
face. She forced up a smile and crushed all the feeling out of it. "Ready
to go home now?" He nodded and pulled back, looked away out the dark
kitchen window. "Hey, I'm sorry about this, Ange." "No problem. Go home
now. Get some clean clothes." He stood obediently and walked towards the
door, then stopped. He was in front of another cluster of pictures, but
she doubted he was seeing them. "I just couldn't believe it wouldn't work,
y'know? It should have worked." He slumped again, sick with wanting some
kind of happy ending. Oh god, she was too tired to be having this
conversation. "Yeah, Ray, it should have." He got that old look, hearing
whatever voice inside that was always telling him he was a total screw-up.
"No, it was stupid. I should have known it wouldn't work." "Ray, you can
make this all your fault if you want to, but it isn't." god this was
tough. "It could have been a lot worse, Ray. Somebody could . . . it could
have been a hell of a lot worse." He turned around and gave her that look
that used to make her melt all over the place, that lost look that used to
make her want to hit out at the rest of the world for his sake. Stupid,
now. "Thanks, Ange." "Aw, no problem. Go home." And this time he did. She
wandered back into the kitchen and put the extra mug away. And that,
friends and neighbors, is what's known as an amicable divorce. Two cups of
coffee later she realized it was Saturday morning, and cursed him,
forgetting that she wasn't supposed to be feeling these things. Outside,
the birds started bragging about sunrise and birdy love, too stupid to
realize that this was Chicago with winter just around the corner; no place
for birds. "Not Even Inuit Stories" copyright 1996 AC Chapin
sdragon@Glue.umd.edu This story (and all of them are, really) is dedicated
to Amy Steele, my hero, to whom I always go when I've had a crisis at four
in the morning. AC Chapin sdragon@Glue.umd.edu
http://www.glue.umd.edu/~sdragon FoDly Cousin, Lonely Goatherd, D'MOB,
OKOK. Never ever "A.C."