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  Eccentric Circles

  Stories

  Larry Duberstein

  New York

  to Flora and Martin

  (and with special thanks to Ted and Dale)

  CONTENTS

  The Second Craziest Person in Casper, Wyoming

  The Collected Letters

  Domestic Tranquility

  The Golden Gate Funeral March

  Fitchburg Depot

  Devereaux’ Existence

  Fishing for Gorillas

  The Off Season

  Lemon Trees at Jaffa

  The Lizard’s Egg

  Moving Water

  The Undertaker’s Choice

  The Last of Harpo Berkowitz

  The Street Where You Live

  Catherine

  The Second Craziest Person in Casper, Wyoming

  I knew something was wrong with this picture even before I opened the front door. Groping past all the junk in Holly’s dark hallway I half expected a nice smack on the head—though I was also thinking, False alarm you paranoid weirdo, you took one too many drugs in the last fiscal year.

  There was something, though, there was a girl on the bed asleep. And as my buddy Wayne said when I told him this whole tale, a strange girl in your bed is not necessarily a bad dream.

  Now it was not my bed precisely, if I do generally sleep in it. (With Holly. It’s her bed.) And it wasn’t exactly a strange girl either, as it turned out. I didn’t know when I first took her in, saw just the naked back with kind of a sweet twist to it. Then I saw the blonde hair and that old blue coat of hers on the chair and knew it was Melinda.

  So you could say that yes it was a strange girl after all, just not a girl I didn’t already know. Or for that matter hadn’t fancied once or twice in the past, though of course who doesn’t fancy Melinda Daniels might be a better question to ask, since apart from her slim and pretty looks she also happens to be the sort of girl who’ll come right in your window and be sleeping naked in your bed.

  Right: Holly’s window, Holly’s bed. But still. I used to go out to the quarter horses with her friend Booth back in the old days, as far back as ol Jimmy Carter. My friend at the time (Fawn, she called herself, though really it was Edna) knew the two of them, and so we four would eat together, do cookouts and beer blasts and so forth, play some cards. One of those couple deals where after a certain amount of it you start to wonder if you wouldn’t rather leave with the other one instead of your own. Just for a while, you know, for the sheer hell of it or for a change. Plus of course it was Melinda.

  I decided the thing to do was make a joke of it. Climb in bed and act surprised: Hey what the hell, you’re not Holly, what’s the deal here? So I strip down and start to peel back the quilt when I uncover her damned infant Clayton in there alongside her. I forgot the kid existed (which he didn’t exist a short while back) plus she looked so slim and single lying there.

  By the time she woke to the scuffling, I had scrambled my ass back in my jeans. Melinda turned herself over nice as you please, not caring about breasts particularly, so that I was obliged to pretend I didn’t care either until she shook her head clear and yanked up the quilt.

  “Pete,” she said. “Hi. Hope I didn’t throw you off.”

  “Not you. Ol Clayton did, though.”

  “Isn’t he sweet? Look at the little toad sleep through everything. He always does.”

  “He’s a good boy, for sure.”

  “Well I’m sorry about just showing up here. I would have asked first—”

  “I know that.”

  “—but I knew Holl was in the hospital and I just guessed you’d be staying at your own place.”

  “I would, but the furnace blew out. I had someplace warm to go to, so I went. That’s all it was.”

  “Same with me. Someplace warm to go.”

  “Furnace kick off at your house too?”

  “No. No, it’s me and Billy. You know I told him he had to find work? I told him before the baby came and that’s almost two years by now. So I finally took some action.”

  “Just now? Tonight?”

  “You got it. I used the window in back.”

  “I figured that. Just curious, though—did you leave Clayton on the ground and go back out for him, or did you bootleg him as you dove through?”

  “Neither. I put him in first and came on after. He stands up, you know. He can walk, Pete.”

  “Just curious.”

  “So do you think it would be a problem, my staying here a short while?”

  “I don’t see why, as long as you’re willing to sleep with me.”

  “You mean sleep, or sleep?”

  “Hell, Melinda, I don’t mean a damn thing, I was only joking,” I told her, though I’d tell you her eyes looking up right then were the most beautiful thing I’d seen in my life.

  “Oh.”

  “But what about Bill? Isn’t Bill going to mind?”

  That was perfectly stupid because of course he’d mind. If he didn’t mind, she wouldn’t have done it in the first place. She was trying to make a point with him. But apart from being knocked silly by the sight of her, I was trying to find things out, too. Joke or no joke, what if I could sleep with Melinda?

  It’s not like I lack the capacity for a little evil. The week Holl was away in Denver, I ended up in bed with the girl in the red dress at Booth’s party and it wasn’t a case of I didn’t love Holl or did love the other girl in her red dress or out of it. It’s just that as I say I can be capable of a sin, the same as you can. Same as we all can, by my calculations, with the possible exception always of Ed Hightower.

  So maybe I began wondering if Melinda wasn’t capable too. At the very least I knew she was famous for her massages, and I could end up needing one of those, for having been displaced onto the sofa-bed by her and Clayton Royal. But a girl who will come in the window might very well sleep with you and surely she will give you a nice little back rub if she doesn’t. Which she did: the back rub.

  “Who cares what he minds,” she told me. “A man who won’t feed his own son? Does he seem to care what I mind?”

  “So you won’t care if he does mind.”

  “That’s true. But Billy minding and not minding is beside the point. Holly would mind.”

  “What about you, though?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  “But Holly would.”

  “Is that supposed to be a joke? Hollywood?”

  “No.”

  “Well you know for sure she would mind. But I suppose I could rub your back for you, if you want.”

  The next night it was Bill who came in the window. Not many secrets in this town.

  After I got off work, and after dinner (which Melinda and I shared in Holl’s kitchen, just your basic bacon and scrambled eggs), we drove up to the hospital together. I’d planned on going every night and Melinda planned on going sometime, so there we were. And there was Bill when we got back.

  We took Holly flowers and magazines and some chocolate she could squirrel away for ammunition. She was looking good and not a bit scared of the operation either. They had said it was a routine procedure—back home in a jiffy, back to work in two weeks—and Holl was never much of a worrier in the first place. I myself do some serious worrying anytime I am near a hospital and when it comes my turn to get committed to the inside of one for a little razorwork, they won’t need a drop of painkiller because I’ll go in a coma first.

  Holl got the simple truth on Melinda
moving in at Price Street. The sofa-bed story was good by her, as a non-worrier anyway. With ol Clayton there it didn’t strike her as a threat, I guess. Or maybe she did under-rate me, that’s possible too.

  Now I wasn’t surprised to find Bill at the apartment but it was a whole new confusion to see Melinda greet him with a loving hug and hello and say how glad she was to see him. Because of course she could have been seeing him every minute if she hadn’t moved out. But here Bill was as sweet on the little boy as he secretly wished to be on her, sort of misdirecting his interest as a trick to court Melinda.

  Lord knows why it never crossed my dull mind the night before, since it worked like one powerful charm. She just started shining on ol Billy as he cheered Clayton Royal along. And the merrier Clayton became, running and giggling, the more lit up his mother, until I was afraid she might jump Bill before my eyes. I could just feel her softly falling.

  It was done politely, though, after a lengthy tuck-in for the baby, and a few pops of the bottle Bill brought, and good-nights all around. Nonetheless it was surely done, because I damn well heard it done, mooing and moaning in Holly’s bed till I nearly chose to go back home to the deep freeze.

  In the morning it didn’t mean a thing. Then they went and had the fight I had expected last night, with Bill saying enough of this shit and let’s go home, and Melinda saying call me when you found steady work, bub, and not before, and Bill going crazy for not grasping her logic, and Melinda advising him to put his logic where the sun don’t shine even in a nudist colony. In the end Bill was throwing things that belonged to Holly, so I was forced to interrupt them.

  Things calmed right down to a reasonable back-and-forth (had he looked for work here and weren’t they said to be hiring there) but I did finally have to get my own ass to work. “Will I expect to find the lot of you here tonight, then?” I asked them, thinking if so I might prefer to see how the burner was coming along at my place. I couldn’t get an answer (as they truly didn’t know one yet themselves) so that is what I did do and was delighted to find the heat chugging along full throttle again. We went below zero that night and next day in the fields, and I personally hate that degree of cold. No amount of clothes gets it done for me at ten below zero.

  So who knows what they did about it. I kept to my own track the next few days. They performed the operation and Holl came through all right; she was pale and weak but that was to be expected, they said. Then they told us that as well as it had gone with her, they would need to go back in again and at that even Holl was scared pissless. As for me, I knew. I was sure I was going to lose her. But as anyone who has accompanied me to the quarter horses can tell you, not all my hunches are letter perfect, and I didn’t lose her, she came through fine both times.

  A few nights after the second procedure, her color was back, and her energy, and she was threatening to dance me across the floor in that solar room where you sit. I was relieved, damn happy, and stopped in at McCloud’s on my way home for some beer and pinball, just to celebrate things swinging back toward normal.

  Normal, hell. Two hours later, around midnight, Melinda and Clayton Royal showed up at my place.

  “Bunk here tonight?” she said.

  “Holl’s house burn down or something?”

  “No but Billy’s moved in there now. He won’t stay off, Pete.”

  “So here you are.”

  “Always on the go,” she grinned. If you are thinking why the hell not just send her packing, with all this crazy shit plus the little guy yelling his head off, well it’s because you don’t realize what a pretty creature she is. Pretty can count. Besides which I was not particularly enjoying my total loneliness in certain respects.

  “I don’t want you to misunderstand,” she said—yet said it with that look of hers, such that I was thinking maybe I should misunderstand. Melinda has better pals than me, so what’s she doing here? It’s one thing coming in Holly’s back window, another thing coming in my front door. No?

  “Won’t Bill just come over here?”

  “Not right off the bat. He won’t think of here, you see.” (That was it.) “But if he does, I’d sure appreciate your saying you haven’t seen us.”

  “Lie to him?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “And then what? Stuff a rag in Clayton’s mouth? Hell, Melinda, this starts to get weird.”

  “I know it.”

  “I guess you can stay, and I might even lie for you, but this time you really will have to sleep with me.”

  Did I mean it? Well no, not seriously: not that I’d stick to it if she opted out into the cold. Let’s say I meant it as a serious suggestion. And if it seems illogical on top of my telling how much I loved Holly, it honestly wasn’t. I could have bedded with Melinda anytime in the last eight years, happily, and still loved my Holl. Now with both the past and the future looking pretty damn distant for me, sexually speaking, the immediate present seemed a good time to tide me over.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “How will you tell?”

  “Maybe tomorrow. Tonight at this hour is just not a live option for me, Pete. Even if the little man was not as miserable as he clearly is.”

  “But tomorrow, you think.”

  “Maybe. On the complete sly from everyone? Why not?”

  I couldn’t believe her too much. If you are looking for positive signs, you can’t really be too encouraged by ‘why not.’ She did say it, though, I had to respect the fact, so I poked my head in the next morning before work.

  “It’s tomorrow, Melinda.”

  Sitting there in a pretty white cotton slip, with her hair pinned up in a cloud, she didn’t know what in hell I meant.

  “Don’t you remember? Why not tomorrow?”

  “Oh I know it, Pete,” she said now, cocking her smile at baby Clayton as if to say ain’t this situation too bad. “It must not be tomorrow yet, if you see what I mean.”

  I didn’t see, not yet. That night I climbed down off the rig, went home to clean up (no sign of Melinda there) and then straight up to the hospital. A promise is a promise. Not that I was sorry, either, because Holl and I had our usual fun, we were happy, and I could tell myself here’s why not, I love this girl, dammit.

  And yet without unloving her in the slightest, I was most definitely leaning back the other way at McCloud’s—back in the direction of why not. I mean, since it’s a freebie and much needed, plus on the sly from everyone? But don’t ever let anyone tell you the human isn’t one strange animal. If he thinks so, well he’s just the last to know, that’s all.

  Meanwhile Melinda was of course not there. Wherever the wind had blown her this time, she was not a girl to plan on. I waited anyway. She had my spare key and so I waited for her, just the way a young fool would have (and I may be a fool but I am way past young, I am a thirty-two year fool to be precise) and I kept waiting past two a.m. for steps or a key clattering.

  At that point I dressed and spun over to Price Street, partly to see who was living there by now. No one was. They had left it a mess but I crawled in Holly’s bed and slept there, for the simple reason that at home I knew I would just keep listening for Melinda, even though I also knew she wasn’t coming. No one goes anyplace at that hour in zero degrees.

  I overslept reveille, slept beautifully as a matter of fact, and decided to blow off work with a telephone lie. Possibly go bet on some ponies instead. For some crazy reason I was in a good mood, but I guess crazy reasons are all there is. I straightened up at Holl’s, scrubbed the pots and swept the breakage, and sealed off the smelly diapers I found floating in the trash. Then, for the sheer whimsical hell of it, I dialed Melinda’s own telephone, and got her.

  “Can you talk?”

  “Sure,” she told me.

  “I mean, is Bill there, now.”

  “Billy? Nuh uh. But he will be back later if you—”

  “I mean hell, Melinda, did you forget all about last night? Forget I was still alive?”

  Saying it that wa
y also supplied me with the answer. Sure she did. Completely. I had outlived my usefulness—though I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t outlived it quite so soon.

  “Absolutely not, Pete. I was going to let you know soon as I could.”

  “Know what, you spaceshot?”

  “That things are working out. Bill got hired in Glenrock and things are really looking up.”

  “What a difference a day makes.”

  “I know it. I hope you understand—”

  “I hope I don’t, Melinda. I couldn’t take it if I were to start understanding you. But that’s all right, that’s fine.”

  I didn’t go to the racetrack, drove up to the airfield instead, and don’t ask me why or why not. I do like the amount of sky out there, the way the sky makes a kind of endless circle inside the mountains. They let you go up in the tower if you want and watch from behind glass panels. You can sit and drink your bottle of beer and no one will know you are the second craziest person in town. No one knows that in the midst of all this recent insanity, you are out here making decisions you’ll never argue with again for the length of your pisspoor life.

  To start with, put a damn lock on Holly’s back window right away, absolutely, should have done it long ago. But then it hardly matters about that if you are saying yes to Holly, you are ready to go to the church with her, and yes to a baby too if they finally do clear her. Dump the his-and-hers, lock stock and windowlock, and start paying on something halfway nice with both our names on it.

  There’s just no point going anywhere else, however big the sky, and no point waiting any longer either, if you are thirty-two already and you know it’s really love.

  The Collected Letters

  Doug had a twinge of self-consciousness taking over a booth designed to seat four. He needed the space, though, the sheltered bay, and was comfortable enough with his bowl of chips, his beer, and all Kate’s letters arranged on the table.

  Since yesterday, when he found the last of these leaning between balusters on the stairwell, Doug had been trying to shake his head clear, to regain his balance. Today he called in sick, then lay in bed like pure weight till one and walked all afternoon, but his mind kept whirling uselessly, temporarily out of order. Now he was here with the letters.