Alan Sincic

  Rumor had it Maggie had taken ill, taken to bed on account of GB, who’d abandoned her. All of which stirred in Joe a (near to fatherly) concern. Such a burden to carry alone.

A single lantern swung from a nail above the transom, lit the empty shell of the Slapjack, confetti-ed the porch with the shadow of a moth. Maggie’d propped the windows, the three on a side, open, so as to ferry the cool night air over the sill and into the heat of the kitchen. Over a sill (the big one, up front) she slung a tablecloth to dry. In the dark of the yard, the brick at the base of the hand-pump shimmered white. Joe could smell the fresh of the paint. From one end of the porch to the other, a coalition of rockers and cane-backs and flimsy wobblers rode up top of one another, locked elbows, tottered over the boy who rode the mop. Magical the hour.

Joe paused at the gate. If he’d had a brake lever to shudder the world to a stop, here would be the place. He straightened his collar and ran his hand atop (without touching) the tin sign that bore the ghost of the old Royster Feed and Seed. The word DINER, in fat red letters, obliterated the rooster logo and the cursive — like piping on a cake — Royster. He could just make out in the glow of the lantern — there beneath a coat of whitewash — a silhouette: Corn, Chemicals, Twine.

Coleman Quick Lite, said the lantern, Sunshine of the Night. From the air it pulled, ample as the air itself, a steady breath. Infinite the breath. It whispered out in equal measure light, and heat, and the earthy scent of kerosene. Coal. Peat. Iron. Such a wonder. How it could be? A wicker filament size of a thimble lights a tree or a dock or a acre of grain, lights, right up to the rafters, the whole of a barn?

So it goes. From out the acorn, the oak. From out a grifter like Maggie, a palace of griddle cakes and hashbrowns and omelets and bacon. It was Maggie broke into the abandoned building, hauled out the rubble, scrounged up a stove and a sink and a counter and a till. She put a cot in the corner and a sign above the door: Pie. Maggie the Maker.

He rubbed at the skin on the inside of his wrist, the one and then the other, there, to warm it, where the pulse runs, the invisible charisma of blood, the trace of Russian Leather by L’ Aiglon he bought from behind the counter at the Five-and-Dime, top-of-the-line elixir framed by a cardboard print of a Cossack Horseman and the slogan Scents and Such for the Hairy-Chested.

And the hat. Hat in hand. Joe had him a weather hat for when the heaven beat the earth and a fair-weather hat for when the heaven behaved. The hats were identical in every way. Size six and a quarter derby in midnight blue, and up in the hollow where the head goes, on a ceiling of silk at the height of the dome, an embossment in gold foil, of a pair of old-timey lions, like outta Robin Hood, like outta Sherwood Forest. The hatter he pictured. Tiny man with calipers and scissors and a ball-peen hammer, the head of which he cushions with the skin of a baby deer. To the gunwale the hatter hammers a little fly of fabric so’s you don’t wear it -- the hat -- backwards, and at a cocky angle he snaps the brim, and into the brown leather sweatband he punches the seal of the patent, Improved Cavanagh Edge 1805977.

Identical, these two hats belonging to Joe, the difference being (as in all things human) the wear. No way around it. You wear a cap to impress, but the minute you wear it it’s a wear on the cap. When the wind bullies and the rain volleys and the sun like a sledgehammer lands, you wear the weather cap, sure – shabby-genteel the word, like the Parthenon, elegant even on the road to ruin -- but when the sky clears? Ah. That’s the moment.

Which is why he never wore the fair-weather hat. He would carry it (careful not to warp the brim) in his left hand, as a token of command, and he would always, at the end of the day, or at a change in the weather, return it to the box -- the hatbox, the Ark of the Covenant, black and octagonal, and carved as if out of a honeycomb, and with a garnish of gold, and stamped with the logo of the Dobbs and Company, Fifth Avenue. The stamp on the box the capper: a carriage with a coachman up top, a whip and a horse and a top hat, the whole deal.

He crossed the dark yard and up the steps to the lip of the porch. On the way there he’d managed to assemble himself a limp and a story to go with it. Portable story. When she would ask, he would shrug, and say it was nothing. No price too high to pay he’d say.

What? she’d say. What do you mean?

It’s nothing he’d say. Don’t mention it.

No – what? she’d say. What do you mean?

So then he’d have to tell her. He was a veteran, see, combat veteran, survivor of the battle of the Marne. He would look out the window. Into the distance. A harbor. Silver in the gloaming as the seed of a pumpkin, there, on the horizon, a ship. Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay they sing – the sailors, arm-in-arm with the soldiers, arm-in-arm with the cabin boys and the mess cooks and the nurses and the captain (brisk as a bonbonniere in his almondy whites and sealed with rivets of royal icing yellow as the yolk of an egg) sing, they sing as they slide off over the edge of the earth and away.

What was it like? she’d say.

The trenches, he’d say, and pause. The Hun.

She’d lay her hand on his. He’d make as if to clench the fist and then, of a sudden, pause. Through the palm of her hand the beat of his heart would travel. Breathless. She would be breathless.

The gas, he would say. The chlorine. The phosgene. The mustard.

Think of it. Picture it. And she would. She would picture it. They would picture it together. Joe, sensitive Joe, day in and day out all sooty as a ham in the midst of that deadly contagion and even -- he would tell her in a husky voice -- he was even, to this day, allergic to even so much as a whiff of mustard. He’d hint how GB’d deliberately, and with malice aforethought, seeded the ground with a tincture of Gulden’s so as to render Joe, and at the height of the duel, and for all intents and purposes, blind as a peeled potato.

Joe stepped out of the shadows and made for the door. The boy dropped the bucket and scurried away. Stick of a kid she paid a quarter a day to fetch and to carry, shadow up beside her as she tooled around town with a basket of pies or dickered with the miller or scavenged away at the landfill for the saleable loot and the fixable treasure. Sparrow, she called him. Typical woman. So scared of a man, she makes a pet of — not that Joe’d be jealous of a boy. Barefoot boy with a pocky face and shred of a shirt and — look at him run. Run from Joe. Force of personality they call it, the way Joe carried himself. How much bigger he felt in the company of smaller beings. And there was more. A feeling he would never name, even to himself, on account of, well, on account of pride. To be with a broken woman, to feel bigger on account of that. He would always be the stronger, the straighter. And the broken building – the Slap-Dash he called it – made him feel even that much bigger. Leave it to Maggie make a bronze medallion from out the petrified patty of a cow. Women. Torture a T-square to find a angle true. Women!

Wrapped in a sheet is where he found Maggie, propped on a stool, sifting through an array of seed packets. Across the broad table she fanned them out, like a hand of solitaire, into separate little kingdoms: the early bloomers, the climbers, the perennials, the bulbs. In the candlelight the kingdoms wavered.

“So Joe. Why the limp? What gives?”

“It ain’t sympathy I’m looking for. That ain’t what I come for.”

“You’re picking the wrong day for pie.”

“I come for the baker.”

“The hell you say. What would you do with a baker?”

“Defend her honor.”

“With what?”

“My manhood.”

She pictured herself in the spring air, in the hot sun, at the center of that burst of bloom. Deployed the bulbs another ten feet closer to the base of the porch. Freed up another patch of sunlight for the perennials. The paper, stiff with the print of azalea and pepper and the red of the radish, crackled in her hand. “I seen a man before. Never seen a manhood.”

“It’s about honor, woman. My honor.”

“So now. So. I thought this was about my honor, but no. No. To defend my honor, it seems, you gotta muster a bigger, a better honor, right? Gotta bolster that mud fence with the sturdy oak of the honor of Joe?”

He limped over to the window where the moon waited. Noble the glow. A step. Two steps. There. Settled. Into a silhouette.

“That’s quite a limp, Joe – jumping like that from leg to leg, one leg to the other.”

“It’s the war, woman.”

“Hope it ain’t contagious.”

“Battle of the Marne.”

“I seen the movie.”

“You shoulda been there. We – ”

“I can picture it now.”

“We – ”

“You and the boys in the back of the Nickelodeon, and skipping school, and attacking a packet of Cracker Jacks with them little marzipan hands of yours.”

“No, no. We – ”

“Pecker no bigger’n a button in the bole of them knickers. Peeping up at the screen – ”

“I’m a veteran, Maggie. That ain’t no way to honor – ”

“There you go. There you go. Honor this. Honor that. Goddammit, Joe. Every damn dish, you serving up a side of honor.”

“But it’s honor that – ”

“So gimme the recipe. What’s it made of, this honor of yours?”

If he’d of had a medal, now. There’s your answer. Grand. The thing about a medal -- Joe thought about the medal, this potential medal of his, with a touch of pride -- you leave it to others to whisper the word of glory. The medal got a voice of its own. A ham or a shoe or a spoon? Dumb. They are what they are. They got nothing to say. But a medal.

“Illuminate me, Joe.”

It was an insult is what it was. How would she like it if he was to ask her to proclaim, out loud, what makes her a beauty? He made as if to leave. He’d been fixing to clap the hat on his head, give her a little tip of the visor, and stride out the door. Lifted his hand to – but then he remembered the weather. Reddened. As if it was owed an apology, the hat.

Over to the counter he strode, so’s to have something to lean on.

“Honor’s in the doing. It’s in the deed.”

“So that clown show up under the bridge. That Dual of the Titans. You got a explanation for that?”

From his shirt pocket he pulled a smoke – Old Gold. Not a cough in a carload. Struck a match. “I got nothing to say. My deeds do the talking for me.” Joe pictured himself at the end of a bar. Dodge City. Cowboy Joe. The thumb a-tap-tap-tapping at the brass buckle with the inlay of ivory, stack of poker chips in the palm of the gun hand, the Stetson – still smokey with the dust of a thousand head of cattle – pitched up onto that set of antlers up top the barroom mirror.

Maggie broke out another pack of seeds. Summer seeds. For when the sun like a blowtorch brittles the grass and bubbles the sap in the tree. She laid them out beside the spring planting, shade to shade, sun to sun, season to season. She talked as she worked, without looking up, in a voice no bigger than a murmur.

“Lemme guess. In your head you got a picture of a person, a notion about a particular person. It’s this picture you been chasing.”

Down the length of the counter he launched a billow of smoke. “I never chase.”

“Chasing after. Sniffing the air. On the hunt.”

“You mean you,” said Joe. “Chasing after you.”

“That ain’t what I’m saying.”

“You flatter yourself, Maggie. What makes you think you’re the onlyiest flower in the field?”

“Joe, Joe, Joe. We ain’t even in the same field together. We ain’t even on the same planet together. But just for the sake of argument, let’s pluck at the ribbon of this little package you paper me in. So I’m a flower now.”

“And not the only flower.”

“But a flower.”

Sweet the way she said it. Here we go. Here the bloom. Joe smiled.

“What do you do with a flower, Joe?”

Joe loosened. Leaned his head left, right, as if to peer round the green of a thicket to find the berry within. “You lean up over. You smell it. You pluck it.”

“And what else?”

Not a man given to poetry, Joe. Tried to picture himself with a flower, jumbo flower, bud the size of a cabbage. You paw at the blossom with the heel of the hand. You poke at the bloom with the rubbery tip of your –

“What good is a flower?” said Maggie. “What do you do with a flower?”

“You… I don’t know. You – ”

“You don’t know. You think you know, but you don’t know.” She tidied the seeds. Squared up the ranks with the slim edge of the arm and the hand together, like a spatula. “You got a picture of a person – a pluckable, a sweet, a breath of air – but that ain’t really a person. Not a real person.”

“Real enough for me.”

“An echo. It’s an echo. I ain’t the one you on the lookout for, Joe. The one you on the lookout for is Joe.”

* * * *

By the end of the week, Maggie was back in business. Sparrow did the chores and the heavy lifting while Maggie set to baking. It’s not as if they waited for GB to return – he’d never made a vow one way or the other, and his trips were always a ramble, but now? It was different this time. He’d managed to occupy, if only for a moment, that province of the heart Maggie marked with the greeting Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted.

She swept the porch. Marveled at the twister of dust at the foot of the broom. Up onto the ruddy sun it sailed. It’s not a color, really, when she thought about it, pink. Not a honest color. An edge in the direction of red is all. Blue sky, clover green, cinder black. Pink? The privates maybe. Snout of a pig, boutonniere with all the brio of a hothouse butterfly. No. So no. She decided she hated the color, she’d always hated the color. When the boys’d bring her tokens of love – the ribbon and the rouge and the hankie – she’d finger the wrapper, baby it open like a crucible of gunpowder. The ribbon? Oh – a tourniquet! The rouge. Pepto-Bismol, no? The hankie she’d ball, up into her fist, hammer the fist, wham, on the table. Thank God I got a blanket here, here in the hand, to warm me in the icy white of the winter.

* * * *

By the time GB re-appeared – two weeks later and not a word in the meantime – Maggie had already convinced herself that, whatever he had to offer, she’d be the one to pay the freight. Round about closing time he appeared. Jimmied the lock and – through the diner in a glide around the dark reef of the tables and the bristle of upended chairs – made his way into the kitchen. She pulled a pie-tin from out a cloud of suds. Gave it a shake. Into a bucket of rinse water flipped it. Without a word he waited. Up overhead, from out the rafters, rigged with a strand of baling wire (and upended so’s to make a shade), a lotus bowl of carnival glass hovered. Tempered, is what it did, the bare of the bulb. Filled the air with a coppery glow. She took her sweet time. Wiped away the suds with the hem of her apron. From a pocket plucked a hankie. Mopped her brow. Hurry Maggie? To hell with that. Nobody hurries Maggie. Into the center of town she clattered, that first day, at the head of a cart she pulled herself. Raised her own chickens, gathered her own eggs, baked her own pies. Peddled them door to door, and at the train depot, and off the front porch of the shamble with a towel for a table and overhead a (beaten to a crisp like the hide of a buffalo) canvas top.

He looked up. In a glance he gathered in the whole of it – this vision of hers of a haven, here, inside, under the tin roof and the rough-cut timber of the high ceiling, under the haze of tobacco, steam of the grill, scent of the waffles and the bacon and the hint of pine from off the sap in the rafters, under the hub-bub of the boys and the clatter of breakfast and the banter – a haven. A home.

Maggie measured the moment. Felt the floorboards yield beneath his weight. When he finally stopped that side-to-side rocking, that boyish hurry to urge the earth along, she straightened her blouse, swept with a single gesture the hair from her eyes, and turned.

He unfurled the paper, bowed, and – without a word – laid it like a feather in her hand.

“So you take it upon yourself – ” She held the deed up, at a arm’s length, like you hold a fish for a photo. He fingered the clasp of the tie that graced the red of the shirt he wore. Egyptian cotton, fresh from out the box, embossed with a set of creases quadrilateral and a stick-pin at the collar and, in a jig at the sleeve like a topwater popper, a yellow tag. Aratan Arrow, half-price.

“Take it upon yourself.” She gave the deed a shake. “To come serving up a letter. Letter with a GB at the end.”

“It’s in honor of you. I did it for – ”

She sang out the syllables: Geee… Beee. Onto the counter she pressed the deed. Bore down with the flat of her palm.

“And GB’d stand for what?” She began to buff the wood. The deed the buffer. “Good old boy? Governor B? God of the Beggers?”

Crackle of parchment. In trade with the townfolk, GB was the consummate grifter, but in matters of love? Maggie had always mocked him for his loyalty to her, told him the only thing worth a damn is the ground you stand on when you stand your ground, so he took her at her word. Dumb like a dog he believed her.

“GB the one to bless the bird and the beast and the crab in a scuttle at the bottom of the sea.”

The paper curdled.

“GB the one to consecrate a quarter acre out of pity for the – ” she wanted to say cripple but the word a bitter one – “the girl with the pie.”

Stopped. Raw the palm. With the back of her hand she brushed away the fragments. “Such a fuss about a scrap of paper, GB. Shame on you.”

“That’s a carbon, Maggie. Got the original on file at the County Office.”

“And nobody the wiser till you come along.”

“I bought the land to keep it safe.”

“Out from under me, right?”

“You talkin like it’s a portable thing. It’s land, Maggie. It’s the earth.”

“And now you got the deed.”

“I got the deed on account a you.”

“And what am I? A vagrant? A beggar for a crumb?”

“That ain’t what I got it for. I got the deed – ”

“Bully for you.”

“— to keep it out the hands of the others.”

“The last I heard it weren’t nobody’s.”

“You heard it wrong. I did the digging. Got the deed from the County Courthouse.”

“So this piece of paper give you the right to – ”

“It’s a piece of paper is all. It don’t mean nothing. Not between you and me.”

“Then why’d you go digging? Why’d you bring it here?”

“It’s a gift, Maggie. Ain’t nobody ever offer you a gift?”

“I got the gift of sight, that’s what I got, and what I see is a boy so taken with a tune he gotta turn a friend into a fiddle to play it.”

“Nobody trying to play you, Maggie.”

“You just gotta make a big show of it, don’t you? You with the hat and the blazer. Pocket hankie. And the socks. Plaid? Tartan plaid? Goddamn ridiculous.”

He reddened. At the oddest things he reddened, GB. Like a post he was, unbudgeable under the blow of an insult, game in the face of mockery, chipper in a battle of wits, but a off-hand comment about the cut of the blazer or the pitch of the derby, a whisper, a look, a wince in the wake of the aftershave and he burns. Go figure. Smack him with a hatchet he smiles: brush him with a feather he bleeds.

“But it ain’t yours, Maggie. You don’t own it.”

“And you do.”

“Until such a time as you got the means.”

“To buy it from you.”

“To take it on.”

“From you. Buy it from you.”

Not that it was ever her property to begin with. A squatter’s what she was. But no matter. Maggie had always been a bender of words. To own. The only thing you ever own is what you take to be your own, she’d say, what you make your own, the earth you pierce with the banner in hand. She was the one furbished the room, tinned the roof, hauled a oven out the wreck of a barn to anchor it here, in the belly of the Feed and Seed. Built the kitchen around it. So no. To hell with the deed and the holder of the deed. The one with the claim was her.

Go figure, right? Even we – who fumble the kiss and paw like a bear at the door of love – could see what a match they woulda made. Pride. The very pride that gave her the punch, that extra bit of brass in the knuckle, kept her ever at a loss in the game of love.

Maggie the scrapper, right? You could fill a depot with the people who fought her. From the very day the polio struck, hobbled her in the sight of others, she set herself in opposition to any word of mercy, fashioned herself into a blade that severed the deed from the doer, that sheered away the whisper of love to leave, in its place, the cry of the broker.

Oh, you say. Cold. No. No-no – think again. It’s not as if she hadn’t been schooled in the ways of the flesh -- the boys back of the mill in the season of bloom, the game of capture-the-flag you play across a acre of timber at twelve but -- come the change, a summer later -- up and down the slope of the skin. She gave as good as she got (this in the day before the polio struck) but even then the object of her pursuit – the lust and the fear and the wonder – was always the boy, the whole of him. Pride of possession.

Not so the boys. The boys a breed of their own. Say you take a flock of geese, separate the ganders, drive ‘em (she read about this one) into a corral apart so’s to ascertain the true object of their desire -- the trigger, the taste, the sweet Dulcinea of the Secret Dream. Good luck with that. Turns out the trigger’s a stick of wood the width of a triscuit. Got a single stripe of red. You fetch it up front of a gander, calibrate the height and – Geronimo – quick as them flippers of theirs can kick into gear, they set to humping the stick.

So goes the gander and the ape and the good old boy. Conflate the whole of a cosmos into a tick-mark. A button of bacon. A nipple.

So pride is what it was. That, and a lack of faith in the power of – no. Lack of faith in even the possibility of love.

Not that GB was any less prideful, no, but he was a practical man. Maggie laughed at the offer he made, as if it were a smallish thing, a parcel of air you append to a name – Mr. or Miss, Cap or Doc or Reverend – and not a piece of the very planet itself. No matter it cost him all he had. No never mind to her. She laughed.

What a sap he was, GB. A rational man, a virtue that made him, in the game of love – and we could all of us see it – a fool. He figured inches, feet, yards. Acreage he figured. The Slapjack too small a claim to carry the day. He pictured himself with a deed in hand to cover the whole of the earth, and the oceans to boot, and the grains of sand by the billion at the border between the two. Everywhere’s where he would be. No place to plant a foot without a charge of trespass. Only then would he relent. Surprise her. Give her back, pressed down and running over, the whole of the world she’d – in her stubborn way – always refused before.

“Don’t be so quick to judge,” he said as he followed her out the back. She carried the rake. He carried the basket of table scraps for the chickens. “We make a good team.”

“Not the word I would use.”

“Partnership.”

“I don’t need no partner.”

“True enough.”

“I go it alone.”

“But you ain’t been alone. You been with me.”

“With you? How do you figure I been with you?”

“Under the same roof.”

“With the mice.”

“Like a family then. Me and the mice.”

“And the chiggers. And the roaches. And the cat, the tomcat scratching at the screen door.”

“To keep you company. You should thank us. How lonely it would be without us kin.”

“I got me all the company I need.” The rake screeched across the stone floor of the coop. “Here. Right here.”

“But now you got a bonus. You got me.”

“And what the hell makes you think I’m in the market for a bonus?”

“You ain’t never gonna find a better offer.”

“So then I’m a charity case. That what you saying? You window-shopping at the rummage sale, is that it?”

“That ain’t what I mean.”

“For your information – and you can stick it in that dime store sombrero you wearing – you ain’t the only offer I ever had.”

“That ain’t what I’m saying.”

“Why just last week I got me a letter from a person of substance.”

“A letter.” Over the chopping block he leaned. Gave it a thump with the palm of his hand. “A letter ain’t the same as a person here, here in the flesh.”

“This particular fella been writing me now for a while.”

“But you never seen him.”

“I seen him alright. At the depot. At the train. I been around. You don’t need to be tramping up and down the county with a map in hand and a carnation in the button-hole just to make a new acquaintance. And you with the – what do they call it? -- after shave they call it. Like it ain’t good enough, the shaving, like you gotta -- splash-on they call it. Nowhere they say you apply it with a paintbrush.”

“The only women I ever meet – ”

“You got options. I know you got options. But I got options of my own.”

The Spaniards got the feel of it. How it works. The Flamenco they call it. You got a fella and a girl in a swirl around a center invisible to the eye. In the center of the center is the place they’re gonna meet. Or you think they’re gonna meet. You can picture it. You can see them paint it, the possibility, in the way they move, the one to the other, like planets or comets in a loop-de-loop you thinking pow they collide but no, it’s a miss. Round and round they go. What does it mean? In equal measure we near and we far. We flee the one we hunger to hold.

“So you got options. So this fella. You got a portrait? Cameo? Lock of hair? Tattoo?”

“He’s a tall fella. Taller than you.”

“Is he a dancer? This gal of mine, she’s a dancer.”

“Can’t be much of a dancer if she dancing with you. You move like a mule.”

“I got abilities you ain’t never seen before. You’d be surprised.”

“How come I never seen this gal of yours?”

“She don’t live here.”

“Don’t ever come to visit?”

“Maybe she will. Just maybe she will.”

So the game was on. Maggie pretending she got a fella. GB pretending he got a gal. They smiled like it was a joke. The joke a way to pretend. To play like the hand -- that hand you reaching with -- it ain’t really a hand. The touch on the shoulder, it ain’t really a touch. It’s a stir is all, a touch of air, a breath without a word.