Nebraska (6 page)

In the mirror he was sitting in the chair in khaki pants and green rubber boots, his legs crossed at the ankles. He was wearing a Pendleton shirt and his hands rested heavily in his lap. Light slanted in from the window.

I wish I had a camera.

He glanced down and squeezed the flesh of his belly. I'm getting fat.

He could see in the mirror that his dog's head was tilted up at him. She dropped her chin on his knee.

Look at us, he said.

*
*
*

His food tasted bad and he was out of cigarettes. He sat in a stuffed chair all day and watched his dog. Her teeth nitched at her paw. She groomed her tail. She splattered water when she drank from her pan. When he called, she didn't come.

He dealt solitaire and listened to the radio. Once he got up and squashed an insect that was loggily crawling the floor. His dog got up and sniffed it.

He put on his coat, loaded the magazine of his gun, and locked the cabin door from the outside. He waded through snow to the center of the clearing. He saw his dog barking at the cabin window, her paws on the sill, her breath fogging the glass. He carefully lowered the gun on each of the nearer trees. Bark exploded off with each shot. His dog dropped from the window.

He shoved the gun back into the pocket of his coat and filled his lungs with cold air and smiled agreeably. He stamped his boots on the porch step and saw that the door had somehow been unlocked. He went inside and saw his dog sitting primly by the chair. He slammed the door but it didn't close.

She scratched at her neck with a hind leg. It turned the leather collar, jangling the tags.

He grumpily paced the cabin.

Ching ching ching, he said. He bent to her level and said it louder. Ching ching ching ching ching!

His dog regarded him angrily.

She would chew a swatch of hair, then lick it, then chew again.

The coffee in his tin cup was cold. He pushed it across the table, turned on the radio, and watched her teeth burrow higher. He watched for quite a while, then banged his cup. Why are you always eating at yourself?

She looked at him and returned to her thigh.

He went to the kitchen, rinsed his cup, and poured himself more coffee.

You never used to do that.

He saw new flakes of snow tap against the window.

I
hate
that sound.

He kept waking in the middle of the night to see her there beside him on the comforter. She would be silent, observing him, stars of light in her eyes. He would resist touching her and shift to his side.

His dog was off somewhere. He stumbled through the forest, blowing on his fingers. His gun was cold under his belt. He heard his dog growl and wrestle with something. He ran ploddingly through snow, his breath surging, the gun outstretched in both hands. He reached a clearing and saw his dog near a fallen deer, sniffing the red stains in the snow.

Quit that! he shouted. He rocked from side to side, stamping his boots. Quit that quit that quit that!

She stared at him, then trotted ahead, blithely sniffing at snow-laden ferns. She snapped at yellow weeds and dug through snow to the ground.

He ran a few steps and kicked her, knocking her into a tree. She yelped and shied from him and limped ahead, looking over her shoulder with suspicion.

He was awake all night. In the outer room she was growling.

Shut up, for God's sake.

She growled the way she did sometimes when he came too near her food. He threw the covers aside and stood next to the bedroom door. Shut up!

He opened the door and she raised her pitch. She glared at him.

Quiet!

Her nose wrinkled and her teeth showed.

He closed the door and leaned against it.

At dawn she still made the noise, but it was hoarse and dry, like bricks rubbed together. He dressed and went out to her. Her head was on her paws. She growled and lifted her eyebrows and glared at him.

What's the matter, girl? he said soothingly.

Then he reached for her and she grabbed his hand in her jaws. She jerked and shook his arm painfully. He slapped at her but she held. He kicked at her and fell. He yanked a drawer and the lamp table tipped. His gun clattered onto the floor.

She let him go.

The skin was badly torn. He pressed it with his handkerchief. I guess that does it, doesn't it? You and me are finished.

He let his hand bleed under the cold water of the kitchen tap. He couldn't move his fingers. He came out of the kitchen with the bite wrapped.

I mean, do you think I could live with that? Huh?

She looked at him mistrustingly.

He threw his things in the back of the jeep, brushed off snow, and started it. His dog leapt at the jeep windows, scratching the paint, then barked at the caking tires. He put the gun on the seat beside him, and the rubber mask over it. In his rearview mirror he could see her chasing him.

He could brake and throw the jeep into reverse. There'd be a bump and a screech from her. She'd lie in his tracks, shaking
with agony. He could then back up over her. The jeep would raise and lower.

He did not do that. But he drove away thinking nothing was too awful for her. She deserved the worst.

He swerved his jeep to the front of a small grocery store. He shut off the engine. He rested his forehead on the steering wheel for a minute, then put on his rubber mask.

His dog slept on the bed in the cabin.

The Sun So Hot I Froze to Death

E
veryone is busy here. My wife, Susannah, is wearing a string bikini and a straw hat as she cultivates her victory garden, polishes the watermelon, claws at anthills with a pitchfork. The kid is at his swimming lessons inhaling chlorine and water again. Our housegirl, Mutt, is being joyfully molested in her basement room. And I have a science-fiction story rolled into my typewriter and pages next to it that are just okay. We're big on summer projects.

Along the sill of my window are the ragged tops of green trees and the gray Long Island Sound. All above that is blue. On my desk is an expensive briefcase I haven't shut, emphatic letters I haven't opened, masterpieces I'll never read. The first line of my short story is: “There was once a good guy who was held prisoner by stupid beings on another planet for three years.”

It seems like longer. My hero is despondent. He's skin-your-nose sad. At one point a top-dog Tripid suggests he stop brooding, forget whatever's making him so gosh-darn miserable—they talk like that on Planet Dumb—and compile a list of all the reasons he has to be happy despite everything. It's a tremendous success. It turns out my hero is pleased about a lot of things. There's plenty of parking spaces for his car, somehow his socks are always clean, the Tripids serve him buttered popcorn that never seems to creep down between the sofa cushions.

The list really cheers him up.

So: I find my wife desirable. The kid wants to be an astronaut. Mutt gives me a wink now and then. Besides this glorious summer house, I have a six-room apartment in the city that's right on a subway stop. I play squash at noon and haven't chipped a tooth yet. I have only a little trouble sleeping. I am not a writer by profession. Susannah always manages to bring out the best in my performance. I can mix a great martini without a jigger, haggle with garage mechanics, dig burnt muffins out of a toaster without unplugging it. And there are no euphemisms in this house, no toodles or potties or number twos—it's “Dad, my penis is caught in the zipper!” that the kid screams down the hall.

But.

The plumbing is bad here. When most people flush their toilet, it makes a ferocious sound like
Wush
!
Ours goes
wickle wickle.
In my own house I'm ashamed to go to the bathroom. Also, the drain in the tub doesn't suck anymore. Hair and scum and a squashed water beetle float around in a pool when the shower's on. To wash your feet you have to close your eyes. And the double sink in the kitchen. Whenever Mutt lets out the dishwater, a soup of vegetables and eggshells churns up on the other side. “Dad,” the kid yells. “The sink's throwing up again.”

Mutt diets and tans, drinks tea and reeks with lotions. She wastes away on her lounge chair with aluminum foil angling sunlight at her as she poises a glaring reflector underneath her chin. Her bones are like Tinkertoys. My wife wails, “Please please eat something, dear. We're responsible for your well-being.”

“Food's such a bore,” she says. “I mean, it's just so
redundant
.” When it rains, she makes out with the boy from the lawn service. Even when she's gone, her room groans with pleasure.

Meanwhile the kid is terrified of everything. Phone calls
upset him, he runs howling from the room when I turn on the nightly news, the Sunday comics give him bad dreams. “Kid, kid,” I say painfully. “How can you expect to go to prep school if you're constantly terrified? How can you ever expect to be a daddy?” Sometimes I hear the screech as his bed is shoved against the door.

As I already said, I find Susannah desirable. I like watching her bend over. I'm aroused when she files her nails. When she sneezes, she makes a delicate little
choo.
Her lipstick sometimes wavers off her mouth, but even that I find appealing. She likes to zip up my pants. She is, however, continually racked with tears. I have been called to gasoline stations and supermarkets to find her slumped and sobbing on the floor. In her sleep she murmurs, “Caveat emptor.”

In “The Prisoner of Planet Dumb,” my hero is captured by tiny people, Tripids, with huge brown heads, big mustaches, ears, noses, glasses, funny little hats. They look like Mr. Potato Head. The kid's got one growing roots. They tumble out of the spacecraft, trip on toys carelessly left in the yard, run smack into a fire hydrant; one takes a shot at a glowering swing set while three others shout out warnings to the banged-up garbage cans. The rest apprehend my poor hero and carry him into the saucer “like the coach after a winning season.”

Once on the planet, my hero is put in an enormous office, completely alone. Wooden secretaries sit at the desks with big balloons under their sweaters and postage stamps glued to their tongues. Typewriters clatter, telephones ring, a watercooler hums. Daily he's given someone else's cheese Danish with his coffee. Each day at ten the same company newsletter circulates, warning of manpower cuts and the need for expense-account receipts. Each day at four there's an office party with streamers and horns. Giggling and kissing noises are piped in; the elevator
is stopped between floors; a wife phones for her husband and a big voice yells, “He just left!”

My hero is fed three times a day but the meals aren't nutritionally balanced. One of the Tripid researchers discovered that the average American male consumes sixty apples per year, eight cloves, seventy-two pounds of flour, thirty-nine ounces of pepper, et cetera. So on his first day there he's issued ninety pounds of sugar to eat and a tin each of nutmeg and paprika. The second day he's given twenty-three pepperoni pizzas and a market basket of oysters. The third day, four hundred and twelve grade-A medium eggs. And so on. They infect him with athlete's foot and earaches. They give him colds that just seem to keep hanging on. They find out his body temperature is ninety-eight point six, so the office is kept at ninety-eight point six. He drinks holy water from Lourdes and wine made from spinach leaves. He's got memory implants of Paris in the spring, a Yankee game that was rained out, someone else's senior prom in Spokane, Washington. They think my hero is perfectly happy.

This story's about sloppy research.

My poor hero is very unhappy. They sense that because he fails to initial their memos and is letting his subscriptions lapse. They dispatch their best physicians, who spray him with an oil that prevents foods from sticking to the skillet. They put corn plasters on his toes and prop up his jaw with a neck brace. They slip him feminine napkins, antacids and pertussives, pills for lower back pain. He remains disconsolate. Several of them try to talk to him, make him open up, but they all sound like potatoes, and my hero can't understand them. Finally he's examined by a physician who learned the English language in a Milwaukee bar. He slaps my hero on the back and shouts, “Whatchu say, you goof? Da wife letcha outa da houze?”

The doctor climbs a stepladder to peer into my hero's ears and eyes. “I'm tellin you palookas,” he says, “dis is one big guy we got here. Lookit dem arms. Lookit dem coconuts on him, wouldja?”

The doctor finds nothing wrong. He merely looks at his subject earnestly and asks, “What is dis? You pullin da wool over my eyes or what?”

It's at this juncture that my creative juices peter out.

I'm outside now, in a collapsible lawn chair. I'm wearing swimming trunks that used to fit and a painful jockstrap that's begun to unravel at the waistband. The sun is hot and the pink sweater on my glass of gin is beginning to get soggy. My wife is scolding weeds again. Mutt is recumbent on the diving board with her halter off and her two cute little cupcakes showing. And I'm reading an advertisement for a book about Vincent van Gogh that's just come in the mail. The advertisement flaps in the breeze.

There's a lot about madness and despair in the copy. There are reproductions of van Gogh's paintings. One landscape shows windblown grass and twisted cypress trees, a dark, roiling sky, a lonely path meandering off the canvas. An expert notes the anxiety that caused this painting. Another is a picture of a room. Someone indicates that everything—chairs, pillows, pictures on the wall—is paired, illustrating the solitary artist's acute need for companionship at the time of composition. “You will see,” the publishers claim, “how this tortured soul was able to create great art from squalor.”

And that brings me to this. I was an M.B.A. student in finance when I married Susannah. We rented an economy apartment and cuddled up by my hi-fi set, and if we scrimped, we could afford a movie once a week and split bargain beers with pictures of mooses and elk on the labels. Life was good, if
unglamorous, and we were, as I remember it, very happy. Then I graduated and took a junior executive position in a large bank, and within a year I had three varieties of twelve-year-old Scotch in my kitchen cabinet. Susannah became pregnant, and greed instructed me to resign from the bank for a comptroller slot with a hot company that took just four months to fold. We descended into a neighborhood where the kids carried swords, Susannah did other people's ironing, I drank ale that tasted like fizzed-up tea and had a picture of a platypus on the label. But inside of two years I made a great comeback. Soon I had a metallic-gray foreign car and half a brownstone in the city, and I stocked a wine cellar with bottles that I gingerly rolled and marked every month. We were very, very happy.

It goes up and down like this.

Culprits who'd apparently missed out on the advantages that our great system has to offer stole everything in the brown-stone but some leftover platypus ale. The bistro that I owned a piece of was closed by the fussy health department because of spiders in the casserole. I failed to completely survive an income-tax audit. We were hard hit that year, but that was okay, we were young, we were vigorous, we could deal with a setback or two. I paid off my debts and losses, cut down on the Scotch, and limited ourselves to one night of amusement per week, usually topless dancers and tacos. Soon we were rolling again. I got into a high-tech company at ground level and scored big on a merger. I was tapped to join a partnership investing in treasury bills—one of those can't-lose propositions. Then one day I said, “Look, Susannah, we have all this dough stashed away and what's it earning, eight and a half percent? Why don't we make it really work for us?” Which, of course, is the same as saying, “Jeepers, everything's going so swell, why don't we screw it up?”

So we overextended our credit and bought this summer
house and this shrinking housegirl, Mutt, and riding lessons for the kid, which he hates, and swimming lessons so he can swallow the pool. And the plumbing's bad here and the mosquitoes whine at your ears at night and we all have pathetic summer projects: victory gardens, chocolate suntans, science-fiction stories. Yesterday I came out here with a book, planning to sit down for a good read, but the world was so much with me that I spent all of the afternoon just staring at the hedge.

The yard gate swings. The kid drags through, rubbing his eyes, his wet swimming trunks for some reason cocked rakishly on his head. Susannah walks to him; he sprints and buries his face in her bikini. “Who did this to you?” she demands, and he blurts some preschool language. Mutt and her boyfriend are in the pool going at it. I take van Gogh with me to the house. The last thing I hear Susannah say is, “Did you
tell
the lifeguard you were drowning? Well, honey, how do you expect him to know these things if you never speak up? You've got to put your best foot forward!”

Upstairs I typed this about my hero: “He fixed his eyes on the Tripids’ large pink noses and black glasses as they murmured to each other in gobbledygook. After a silence he swelled his chest and made a heartfelt speech, telling his audience how terribly mixed-up Planet Dumb was.”

Just that much wore me out.

At dinner the kid decided to eat his food without utensils or fingers. He poured his milk in a bowl and lapped at it. His head burrowed into his coleslaw. He pushed his corn around with his nose. I would have preferred it otherwise. Mutt was facing me, her lips as pinched as a dime, decomposing. I imagined those hungry cells of hers jumping ship by the thousands. Since she wasn't eating, she could talk without mispronouncing a word. She said, “I used to work at this nursing home, you
know? And there was this snowy-haired old lady who just sort of
disintegrated
one year. I'd walk past her room in the morning and hear her shout, ‘Welp, that's it for the kidneys!’ On another day she might squawk to herself, ‘So it's the feet now, is it? Good riddance!’ It seemed every week she'd lose the use of something else and
herald
it to herself: spleen, eyelid, pancreas, hip. The doctors could never find anything wrong, but still she declined. I visited her in the hospital and she looked dreadful. She'd kick the bucket that very night. Like a dope I asked, ‘How are you feeling now, Meg?’ And in this tired, creaky voice she said, ‘Oh. Pretty. Good.’”

The kid snarfled at his hot dogs.

Susannah said, “When I was a little girl, there was a farmer down the way with a henhouse and he'd let his chickens out to peck at the gravel on the road. Oh, golly, there must've been two dozen chickens to start with, but one by one they got creamed by automobiles. I kept appealing to the farmer, ‘Shouldn't you be more cautious with your birds?’ I'd say, ‘Couldn't you tend them somewhere else?’ He'd merely chuckle and answer, ‘Those chickens aren't as stupid as they look. Those chickens do fine out there.’ The last time I saw him he was still grinning from his front-porch rocker, overseeing his last skittish hen.”

The kid wiped his face with the tablecloth. “Are the elves Santa's children?”

I trudged up the stairs to the dark study with my typewriter in it. I hit the switch on the desk lamp and shook it until the light bulb flickered on. I changed the ribbon in the machine.

My hero tells the people of Planet Dumb that they've made a ridiculous mistake. They were probably looking for a new frontier, he says. They were probably searching for a specimen, an example, a typical human being, and inadvertently picked up the one man on Earth who was sui generis, unique. He tells
them, everyone else is helpless. Most people on Earth wake up in the morning wondering what they can do to make themselves miserable. From the moment they're born, they play games where nine people try to sit on eight chairs. Hundreds of people buy chances for one puny prize. They punish themselves in amusement parks. They don't have gills but they try to swim. They have sports in which a person is supposed to carry a ball from one place to another, but instead of being careful about it, the player tosses it in the air, bounces it, negligently hands it to other people. And Earthlings are constantly at war with their bodies. Those who haven't given up eating are increasing themselves with gluttony. Or they're developing stammers and tics and sweaty palms. They're afraid of airplanes and snakes and growing old, of dogs and earthquakes and fires and guns, and of being unable to make a commitment. If there aren't any bathrooms around, that's when they have to go. Only when they've taken a forkful of food do they sneeze. They have Sunday pipes and trick knees and allergies; they have cricks in their necks and butterflies in their stomachs and crazy bones near their elbows.