Strange but True (10 page)

All winter Wilbur watched over Charlotte's egg sac as though he were guarding his own children. He had scooped out a special place in the manure for the sac, next to the board fence. On very cold nights he lay so that his breath would warm it. For Wilbur, nothing in life was so important as this small round object—nothing else mattered.

While Charlene read, Pilia stood behind the circulation desk stamping books so loudly she may as well have been taking a hammer to them. The commotion was all done in an effort to distract Charlene, since Pilia was jealous that she didn't get to run the library events. But Charlene didn't let it bother her. She maintained perfect focus as she turned the pages and read on, never once stumbling over the words:

He walked drearily to the doorway, where Charlotte's web used to be. He was standing there, thinking of her, when he heard a small voice.

“Salutations!” it said. “I'm up here.”

“So am I,” said another tiny voice.

“So am I,” said a third voice. “Three of us are staying. We like this place, and we like you.”

Wilbur looked up. At the top of the doorway three small webs were being constructed. On each web, working busily was one of Charlotte's daughters.

“Can I take this to mean,” asked Wilbur, “that you have definitely decided to live here in the barn cellar, and that I am going to have
three
friends?”

“You can indeed,” said the spiders.

After she finished the book, Charlene used to take out a fake spider's web made from white yarn and ask the children to tell her what words they imagined in it to describe themselves. The boys always saw adjectives like
fast, strong
, and
tough
, whereas the girls saw words like
sweet, pretty
, and
happy
.

Even though she feels silly about it, Charlene allows herself to play the same game now. She looks into the web above her bed and imagines that spider coming back from wherever it is to spin something that describes her too. At first, all she can envision are the same words from the book,
Some Pig
. Lying there among all those empty soda cans and junk-food packages in her bedroom, the truth of the statement causes her to laugh in spite of herself. Then she squints her eyes and does her best to imagine other possibilities. It's been so long, though, since she's pretended or played any sort of game that it doesn't go very well. All Charlene sees is:

Some Mother
.

Some Wife
.

Some Failure
.

She looks away, releasing an enormous sigh and telling herself that it's a stupid game and she's too old for it anyway. On the TV screen, there is that grating commercial for a wide-eyed psychic with a purple scarf and clunky jewelry. The sound is still off, but Charlene has seen it enough times to know that she is promising a 100 percent accurate reading as she shuffles the tarot cards and the phone number flashes beneath her with the words
CALL NOW!
It makes Charlene think of Melissa Moody again and her cassette tape of the woman who claimed to speak to the dead, so she turns her gaze from the screen once more and looks at the ceiling. The image must still be etched in her vision, though, because for the briefest moment Charlene thinks she sees the same words up there in the web:
CALL NOW!

And what she does next surprises even her.

Charlene reaches over to the nightstand and picks up the telephone. But instead of punching in the 900 number of that psychic on the screen, she calls the only person who might be able to answer the question Philip asked downstairs: what if someone took it from his body afterward? Charlene is calling her ex-husband, Richard, in Palm Beach. He's a doctor, after all. A doctor who happened to be working at Bryn Mawr Hospital that summer night five years before, when the EMTs brought in the mangled body of their younger son.

PHILIP IS PARKED OUTSIDE THE OLIVE GARDEN RESTAURANT,
looking over his midterm poetry portfolio and killing time before his shift. As a rule, he never
ever
gets to work early. But he and his mother had another one of their blowouts this afternoon, their worst yet, so he tore out of the house and drove aimlessly around Radnor and Wayne before finally ending up here in the parking lot, trying to forget the last thing she said to him before he left home.

Spread out on the passenger seat among his Madonna tapes, spiral-bound notebooks, and a soiled waiter apron are the drafts of the poems he has been working and reworking all semester, each of them marked with tomorrow's due date: October 20, 1999. When he read over the revisions last night, Philip actually felt the slightest bit proud of his work. But as he scans the titles now—“Dark All Day,” “Unfamiliar Family,” “Don't Try This at Home”—it is all he can do not to use the car's cigarette lighter to set the pages on fire. He even contemplates tossing the entire portfolio into the Dumpster behind the restaurant, but a flock of dirty seagulls is hovering above, taking turns swooping down for scraps, and Philip has always had a phobia of birds.

At the very top of the pile is the poem he wrote last June for Ronnie, the one he worked up the courage to read at the funeral. Now he is mortified that he did.

“Sharp Crossing”
by Philip Chase

You walked along a barbed wire fence

Between this field and the next

Ambling and happy, showing no sign of what was about to occur

You waited for the farmer to turn his tractor toward home

You waited for the horses to move to another patch of grass

That's when you climbed the fence

You thought no one was looking

But I was

I saw you slip over to the other side

Tear your clothes

Cut your skin

But what did that matter now?

You were limping toward a new home with new rules in that faraway field

As the farmer disappeared behind his barn

As the horses returned to smell your blood on the grass

You were the one who was hurt

But I am the one who is crying

Dr. Conorton, Philip's shaky-handed, bushy-browed poetry professor, had called Philip into his cramped office at the community college and told him that, in his opinion, “Sharp Crossing” was good enough to publish. He even scrawled the names and addresses of a half-dozen journals and reviews he thought might accept the poem for their summer issue. The news had been the first thing to remotely lift Philip's spirits in a long while. For weeks afterward, he walked around feeling puffed up with pride and (even though he would never admit it) a tad superior to the other students. During class, he took to looking around the circle of desks at the faces of his peers—the angry, divorced woman with the shaved head; the muttonchopped Italian guy with the pierced tongue and a leather vest he never seemed to take off; the plump, daffy hairdresser with overprocessed hair and extralong fake nails, each with a different swirling design and the occasional faux diamond chip near the tip—and Philip thought, Unlike you people, Conorton actually thinks I stand a chance of publishing my work. Someday, somebody besides the ten of us in this classroom might read my words.

All of that uncharacteristic arrogance and optimism is gone, though, as he sits in the restaurant parking lot, feeling less like an up-and-coming poet and more like a waiter with a pipe dream. He begins to wonder if Conorton had said those things simply out of pity, since at this very moment, his work reads like the same kind of self-indulgent crap that everyone else in the class writes. To prove it, Philip reaches for his backpack on the floor and pulls out his folder of other students' poetry. The first one he finds is by that divorced woman whose writing is always a free-verse metaphor for sex with her ex-husband:

“Run Me Over, You Fucking Bastard”
by Jilda J. Horowitz

Go ahead, bastard

Shift your monster truck in reverse

And back over me again

Who's going to stop you anyway?

Certainly not me

I'm just a stupid animal

Lying naked and splayed

In the middle of the road

Full of desire for this sweat and sex

That is certain to kill me once more

Even though I'm already dead

Go ahead, bastard

Make me see the light

As you grind your tire tracks into my soul

Deep and grooved, the way a horny bitch like me wants it

Otherwise, how will I know you've been here?

So plow your pitiful path in the mud

Only it's my blood that will bear the marks you leave behind

Go ahead, bastard

Now that there's no doubt

I am dead, yet again

Spin those fat tires onward to the rally

Where you will drink and laugh

With other man-monsters just like you

Go ahead, bastard

Forget about me

Back on the highway

Where Animal Control has come to shovel up the carcass that was once your wife

I am no different than roadkill to you, bastard

A road pizza with the works

A raccoon

A possum

Somebody's once-cuddly pussycat

Philip groans and tosses the paper on the seat, trying his best to recall exactly what Conorton had told Jilda about this tirade she calls a poem in order to gauge the validity of his comments about “Sharp Crossing.” He closes his eyes and replays the moment she read it aloud to the class as spit sprayed from her thin lips whenever she said the word
bastard
, and her voice rose and fell, rose and fell, until she finished and the room went silent. Everyone in the class stared down at the copy on their desks as though searching for a teleprompter to tell them what to say. When Philip couldn't stand the tension any longer, he cleared his throat and told Jilda that he liked her use of the truck rally as a metaphor to express her anger, leaving out the obvious fact that it was more than a little bit heavy-handed. The compliment softened the permanent frown on Jilda's face so much that Philip got carried away and went on to tell her that he thought “Run Me Over, You Fucking Bastard” was even better than her previous week's poem, “Attention Kmart Shoppers, My Vagina Is on Sale.”

When the back door of the restaurant creaks open and slams shut, Philip gives up trying to remember exactly what Conorton had said to Jilda. He opens his eyes to see Gumaro, the five-foot-tall muscleman dishwasher from Mexico City. Even though the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant, not a single Italian works in the kitchen. Mexico, Portugal, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, even Guam—but Italy, no. Philip watches Gumaro carry a bus bin to the Dumpster, where he stands on his toes and empties the contents over the edge, sending the seagulls into a tizzy of swooping and squawking, before he turns back toward the kitchen door. That's when he spots Philip sitting in his old Subaru across the lot and shouts,
“Oye, maricón. Como estás?”

The guys in the kitchen call just about everyone who works at the Olive Garden a
maricón
—faggot—so Philip isn't insulted, though he makes sure to call him a name right back. “
Bien, pendejo. Y tú
?” I'm good, asshole. How are you?

Philip has learned more Spanish working this job than he did during all four years of high school. He'd be hopeless checking into a hotel or buying a train ticket in a Spanish-speaking country, but if he ever wants to tell someone off, he knows all the right words. And since the next thing Gumaro says is,
“Bien. Pero tu mamá no vino anoche a mamarme mi pinga como siempre,”
which means, I'm good, but your mother didn't show up to suck my dick last night the way she always does, Philip takes a breath and lets it rip:
“Qué pena, porque tu mamá, tu hermana, tu tía, tu abuela
, y
tu abuelo vinieron a mi casa para mamarme mi pinga y a doscientos de mis mejores amigos ayer. Y lo hicieron gratis esta vez. Fue excelente. Tengo el video si lo quieres rentar.”
Translation: That's too bad, because your mother, your sister, your aunt, your grandmother,
and
your grandfather showed up at my house last night to suck my dick and two hundred of my closest friends. They did it for free this time. It was great. I have the video if you want to rent it.

Gumaro drops the empty bus bin and makes a beeline toward the car. Even though it's a cool, cloudy autumn day, he is wearing nothing but a thin white T-shirt and the same kind of black-and-white checkered pants that all the guys in the kitchen wear, only his pair is cut off unevenly and frayed at the knees. When he reaches the car, Philip notices a thin layer of sweat glistening on his dark skin from the heat of kitchen. Gumaro grins, big and wide. “You are getting good, my friend,” he says in a low voice, leaning one of his beefy arms on the roof of the car. “See what happens when you study with the best
profesor
in town?”

“Gracias, profesor,”
Philip tells him.

Gumaro motions toward the passenger seat with his chin. “What's that?”

“Just some school stuff.” Philip wishes he had thought to put his portfolio away, since he doesn't want to be teased about it from now into eternity.

“It looks like poetry,” Gumaro says.
“Te gusta
poetry?”

Philip asks him how to say “You are a nosy bastard” in Spanish, but Gumaro doesn't answer. Finally, Philip surrenders to the moment and nods. Yes, he likes poetry. He braces himself for a crack about only
maricónes
going for that sort of thing. He even prepares a comeback about what Gumaro's mother likes to do with the sheep in the barn late at night while his father sleeps. But all Gumaro says is, “In my country, we have peoples who know how to paint the most beautiful pictures with words. Do you know José Emilio Pacheco?”