24 Hertz: April 2014

Sunday, April 20, 2014

Not A Magician

a short story by Toon Regier

“I WANT MY TOE BACK!” Tom shouted.

The doctor donned a pair of gloves. “May I see it, Mister McCain?” he said.

“That’s Corporal McCain to you!” Tom barked.

The doctor smiled at Tom’s wife, who zipped open her purse.

“No, Barb!” Tom said, stuffing his fist into the purse. “Let me give it to him.” He lifted out a plastic sandwich sack filled with gore and offered it to the doctor. Then he sat with Barb, panting in his anxiety, while the doctor frowned at the severed toe inside.

Gasoline fumes and the smell of grass clippings on Tom’s clothes filled the office. Barb fanned herself. Tom tore out handfuls of his shaggy, white hair. “There there, Thomas,” Barb said. “It’s only a big toe.”

“Yeah, and I’m mighty fond of it,” Tom said.

At last the doctor shook his head. Tom said, “You mean you can’t fix it?”

“I’m afraid not,” the doctor said.

Tom scowled. “Look, Doc,” he said, “I fought in Okinawa and Korea.” He pulled out his old military dog tags from around his neck for the doctor to see. “I got through two wars without a scratch. Hell, I never even been stung by a bee. And now you’re telling me I’m gonna lose a body part in my own backyard!”

The doctor smiled softly.

Tom said, “Don’t you know how to sew a toe back on?”

“I’m sorry, Corporal McCain,” the doctor said. He winked at Barb and snapped off his gloves. “That toe is beyond repair. I am a physician, not a magician.”

“Where did you go to school, young man?” Tom said.

“Hush, Thomas,” Barb said, smoothing his collar.

A nurse came and bandaged the wound while Tom frowned at a small potted cactus on the floor. Then the doctor prescribed a pain killer and shook Tom’s hand.

“You son of a bitch!” Tom said.

The doctor gave Tom a sloppy salute and gestured toward the door where the nurse waited with a wheelchair.

Barb picked up her purse. “Th-thank you, Doctor,” she said. “Come, Thomas.”

Tom stood up, clutching Barb’s shoulder. “That does it,” he whimpered. “I’m using my next Social Security check to buy a new lawn mower—the kind that dies when you let go of the handle.”

“Be a man, Thomas,” Barb said, wiping a tear from her husband’s cheek. She gripped his arm and nudged him toward the wheelchair; but Tom did not move.

“I was never good at yard work,” he said, his voice rising. “I’m gonna hire a teenager to cut my grass. Let him chop his toes off.”

The nurse coughed and left the room.

“Why don’t you mow the lawn, Barb?” Tom shouted. “You’re the one with the green thumb.”

Barb coaxed him into the wheelchair.

“I don’t know how you make that garden of yours grow,” Tom said, “but I’ll tell you one thing: I’ll never do yard work again!” His voice rose to a howl. “I’m gonna change my bag!” Pleased with his pun, Tom burst into a hybrid fit of giggles and sobs as Barb hurried him out the door.

In the hallway, Tom seized the shiny wheel rims in his hands, squeaking the chair to a halt. He twisted in the seat and looked back at the doctor through his tears, sniffling and gathering composure.

“I want my toe back,” he said again. But this time the doctor could grant the request.

Barb opened her purse.

AT HOME THAT AFTERNOON, Tom stole his wife’s purse and limped into the backyard on a crutch. He looked at Barb’s garden with its labeled rows of vegetables—an island of order in the middle of his chaotic yard. Barb had painted a plaque and staked it in the soil:

EXCEPT A CORN OF WHEAT FALL INTO THE GROUND AND DIE,

IT ABIDETH ALONE:

BUT IF IT DIE, IT BRINGETH FORTH MUCH FRUIT.

The scarecrow in the cucumber patch grinned at Tom with a red Marks-A-Lot mouth. Straw in its sleeves stirred in the breeze like beckoning fingers.

It’s worth a try, Tom thought.

Turning toward the tool shed, Tom saw the lawn mower in the yard where he had left it that morning. He froze and glared at the machine, hating it. The mower’s bag lay in the knee-high weeds with clippings spilled from its opening—like a fat, canvass snake whose salad had disagreed with it.

Tom gritted his teeth and staggered across the yard in a wide arc, avoiding the mower. After much fumbling and cursing in the tool shed (a flower pot fell on his foot), he emerged with a trowel.

He crept back to the garden gate, forced it open with his knee, and waded into the cucumbers. “What’s Barb’s secret, scarecrow?” he said, winking at the stuffed pillowcase face. Studying the straw man, he saw that one of its arms pointed to the corner of the garden where the tomatoes grew. Tom shrugged and hobbled off in that direction. Finding a bare spot on the ground, he knelt and began digging a hole.

“Thomas! Have you seen my purse?” Barb looked through the window and saw the open gate and her husband in the garden. She went outside, letting the screen door slam behind her. “Thomas! What are you doing in there?”

Tom’s head disappeared behind some leaves.

Barb strode into the garden and found Tom hunched in the dirt with the purse dangling from his shoulder. “I’ve been looking all over for you,” she said. Then she noticed the bloody toe in Tom’s hand. “For heaven’s sake what are you doing with that awful thing?”

Tom vigorously scratched an ear. His dog tags jingled.

“You’re not going to bury it, are you?” Barb said, pointing to the hole in the ground.

Tom sniffed Barb’s finger.

“Not in my garden!” Barb said. “Put it down. I don’t want body parts rotting in here. You come inside right now. And get that crutch out of the mud; I spent a fortune on it.”

Tom dropped the toe on the ground and wrung his hands in distress.

“Look at yourself, darling!” Barb said. “You got dirt all over your bandage. What were you thinking, coming in here?”

She helped him stand up. Tom started to cry again.

“Please act like a man,” Barb said. She marched Tom into the house, bolted the lock, and got a chair for him.

“Sit.”

Tom slumped in the chair, facing the window, while Barb squatted at his feet to brush dirt off the bandage. “Do I have to keep an eye on you every minute?” Barb said. “You’ll be lucky not to get an infection.”

Tom stared through the window and said nothing.

“You should be ashamed of yourself, the way you treated the doctor today. You made me want to crawl into a hole and hide.”

Tom just stared.

“Forget your precious toe! Can’t you think of something useful to do with your time? Why don’t you work on our jigsaw puzzle?”

Tom stiffened. He licked his lips.

Barb finished cleaning the bandage. “There. Now behave yourself.” She began unlacing the muddy shoe on his other foot. “Look and see if I remembered to close the garden gate, will you Thomas?”

A low growl rose from Tom’s throat. His eyes were narrow slits.

“Thomas?”

Barb turned around and looked outside. Two dogs were fighting over something in the garden.

First published in The Rockford Review, Autumn, 2003.

Labels: creative writing, dog story, gardening, health care, short story, WWII veteran

"Does Not Play Well With Others" or: "Bill The Bully"

a short story by Toon Regier

The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes revenge in realms of death.
—William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

ONE DAY Kenny cried in the station wagon all the way home from kindergarten. Then at the house he cried on the porch and he cried when his mommy took off his jacket and he cried in the kitchen while she readied lunch. Finally his mommy asked him, “Did that noisy motorcycle scare you in the parking lot at school?”

But Kenny didn’t want to talk. He shook his head, slumped in a corner of the breakfast nook, and watched through his tears as his mommy took a box of animal crackers from the cupboard. “Toot toot! Here comes the circus!” she sang. Sitting next to Kenny at the table, she spilled some animals from the box. “Look at that fat ol’ seal. He wants to be your friend. Now tell me what’s the matter, honey.”

Kenny just rubbed his eyes with his fists and hiccuped. The clock cuckooed twelve-thirty. His mommy shrugged and straightened a pile of napkins. “Where’s your pony?” she said.

At that, Kenny’s tears burst forth anew.

“Oh, I get it!” his mommy said, raising her voice above the din. “Did you forget Merrylegs at school?”

Kenny nodded and cried and cried.

“It’s all right, sweetie,” his mommy said. “You can bring your toy home tomorrow. I bet he stayed right where you left him. Merrylegs is made of plastic; he is not going to trot off and leave you.” She twiddled Kenny’s ear with her fingers till he calmed down.

“M-Mommy,” Kenny said at last, “th-that boy, Bill . . . he’s mean to me.”

“Hmm. Is Bill that new boy at school?”

“Yeah. And he’s m-mean to everybody. Everybody.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Why can’t you and Bill get along?”

So between sobs, Kenny told his mommy all about Bill Broadway.

BILL WAS REALLY TALL, Kenny explained. He had yellow hair that kept getting in his eyes (which were green), and he had pointy teeth like a shark. Kenny admitted that he feared Bill’s stepfather—the bushy-bearded troll who brought Bill to school on that noisy motorcycle. Bill arrived every day wearing Darth Vader pajamas that smelled like gasoline and he had black, cleated shoes. And whenever he did something mean, he laughed low and gravelly in his throat like a monster. “Ih-ih-ihhh!” (Like that.)

Bill did many mean things at school, Kenny said. Today, for example, he buried Merrylegs in the sandbox. Then he laughed that stuttering, guttural guffaw of his—“Ih-ih-ihhh!”—and shouted, “That’s what you get for riding your horse through the quicksand!” Kenny had brought the pony for show-and-tell that day, and it was his favourite toy. He dug in the sand to rescue Merrylegs, but before he could find him, Mrs Wiggle-Waggle, the kindergarten teacher, rang the bell and announced the end of recess. (And Kenny knew better than to linger when Mrs Wiggle-Waggle announced the end of something, be it recess or a covert nose picking.) So Merrylegs was lost, buried alive.

Kenny’s mommy clucked her tongue.

“Wait, there’s more,” Kenny said. Counting on his fingers, he listed some other mean things the bully had done: Bill chased the girls around the playground with the large, wiggly, rubber fly he brought for show-and-tell (“Ih-ih-ihhh! That’s what you get for spreading cooties!”); he unhooked Michael Nasher’s knees from the monkey bars so Michael fell headfirst in the mud (“Ih-ih-ihhh! That’s what you get for hanging upside-down like a vampire bat!”); he slashed Robert Skidmore’s chalk drawing with diagonal lines to make it look like it was raining (“It’s a flash flood! All life will perish!”); he constructed a killing machine with Lego and rammed it into Stephan Howard’s building-block palace (“Death to the royals!”); and he smeared finger paint on little Josie McIntosh’s Brownie vest. (That’s what she got for having freckles.)

And after every mean thing he did, Bill would flash his green eyes, bare his teeth, and taunt his victim with a hideous, rumbly ululation: “Bleh-leh-leh-leh-lehhh!” (Kenny demonstrated.)

“My!” his mommy said, when Kenny had finished telling his woes. “That’s an impressive record of wrongs.”

“Well . . . you would cry too,” he said.

“What did Mrs Wiggle-Waggle say to Bill about all this?”

“She gave him a spankin’.”

“With the ping-pong paddle?”

“No. With a rolled-up newspaper.”

“How many licks?”

“Three.”

“Did he cry?”

“No. He laughed. And Mrs Wiggle-Waggle said she’d tell his stepdad.”

Kenny’s mommy pursed her lips. “Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Do you ever play with Bill, or do you just play by yourself?”

Kenny looked at his crackers. “By myself.”

“You know, sweetheart,” his mommy said, “this is a good chance for you to show some extra-special kindness to someone. Maybe Bill’s house isn’t a happy one like ours; I’ve noticed how gruff that motorcycle man is. Perhaps the reason Bill is mean to everyone is because no one is ever kind to Bill.”

Kenny traced with his finger in the cracker crumbs.

“But if you’re really nice to him,” his mommy said, “and if you greet him and make him feel welcome, Bill will see that you want to be friends!”

Kenny sniffed.

His mommy dried his tears for him with a napkin. “Doesn’t that make sense? ‘Be ye kind.’ Do you think you can try that tomorrow? I'm sure it’s what Mrs Wiggle-Waggle would want you to do.”

Kenny nodded slowly and nibbled a cracker.

His mommy kissed him on the cheek. “Now cheer up. Let’s bake a cake to surprise Daddy when he comes home.”

SO THE NEXT MORNING, Kenny watched for opportunities to be kind to Bill. Climbing the steps to the school, he turned to wave at his mommy as she drove away. Just then the motorcycle came roaring around the corner and Kenny plugged his ears with his knuckles. Mr Broadway, shirtless astride his metal steed, thundered through the gate, jumped the curb, and drove on the grass right up to the door. Bill sat behind him on the saddle, wrapped to the eyes in a red scarf and hanging on for dear life. While the bike sat burping and backfiring in a flower bed, Bill peeled his arms from around the troll’s sweaty tummy and scrambled off. Mr Broadway reached down from the handlebar and gave him a rough whack on the buns, then sped away through the tulips.

Kenny wrung his palms. He opened his mouth to chirp hello, but his voice wouldn’t come. Bill was stumbling up the steps and groping for the door, so Kenny swung it wide and the bully, blinded by his scarf, shuffled in.

Kenny sighed, disappointed by his own cowardice. He knew he should have talked to Bill like his mommy said. As he tiptoed to the classroom (following Bill at a safe distance), he promised himself that he would be brave and somehow win Bill's friendship.

All morning he imagined what it would be like when they were pals. Maybe at recess, he hoped, he could shake Bill’s hand. And Bill would look surprised. And Bill’s meanness would gradually start to melt away all of a sudden. They would walk to the sandbox together and dig up Merrylegs. Bill would grumble an apology. (“Gee Kenny, I’m sorry.”) And then they would play! For a moment during this happy daydream, Kenny considered giving Merrylegs to Bill for keeps. But maybe he could just share the toy a while.

At last he got a second chance. In one corner of the kindergarten room, Mrs Wiggle-Waggle kept a book bathtub—an old-fashioned bathtub with feet. It had a bookshelf on the wall instead of a soap dish, and shaggy carpet squares inside for children to sit on while reading Dr Seuss or The Poky Little Puppy. That morning before recess, Kenny spied Bill’s legs sticking out of the book bathtub. So he went and stood at the edge of the tub, drew a deep breath, and peeked in.

There was Bill, slouching masochistically in the bottom of the tub with his knees hooked over the side and his arms outstretched in cruciform. An upside-down book, Scuffy the Tugboat, covered his face like a roof. Darth Vader glowered from his chest.

Kenny cleared his throat and assumed his most winning smile. “Hi, Bill. Want to play?”

Bill lay motionless, immersed in Scuffy. The scarf pooled under his head like a huge blood clot.

Kenny tapped Bill’s shoe. “Hey, Bill—let’s be friends.”

Bill snuffled under the book.

Kenny’s pulse raced and his mouth dried up. Seconds passed. “You can have my pony,” he whispered.

Bill stirred in the bathtub. Slowly, he began to rise from the bottom, hinged at the waist in a grotesque tummy crunch with his arms rigid. As he pulled himself up straight, the book slid off his face and fell to the floor at Kenny’s feet.

Kenny froze and stared. Little red marks ringed Bill’s neck. His eyes—now black and blue—opened slowly and burned into Kenny’s brain.

“What happened to you?” Kenny said.

Bill growled and quivered all over, as if he had swallowed a small volcano. Suddenly, he bent his arms, coiled them around Kenny’s neck, and squeezed. Kenny tried to laugh but found he could not. Bill squeezed harder, gnashed his teeth, and pressed his snotty nose into Kenny’s face. Kenny let out a gurgly whimper as Bill lifted him off the floor, dragged him down into the bathtub, and gouged his throat with his thumbs.

“Spare the rod!” Bill screamed.

Gasping at the bottom of the tub, Kenny peered up at Bill’s face swimming overhead and fading into darkness.

From somewhere far away, down through miles and tons of ocean, a bell rang. “Recess! Recess!” a girl bubbled.

Bill let go.

Kenny gorged his lungs.

AT RECESS Kenny and Bill sat in the sandbox. They exhumed Merrylegs from his grave and made him trample Becky Snodgrass’s sand village with his hooves. Then, arm-in-arm, the two bullies roamed the playground together, chasing girls with a piece of cat poot. Later they erected a killing machine with Tinker Toys and smashed it into Stephan Howard’s log cabin. Bill stole a Nerf ball from Jeffrey Pinkerton and gave it to Kenny, who ripped it to bits. And Kenny scooped out a handful of peat moss from the terrarium and wiped it on Josie McIntosh’s rear end.

Mrs Wiggle-Waggle gave Kenny a spanking with a canoe paddle.

And Kenny laughed: “Ih-ih-ihhh!”

And Kenny taunted: “Bleh-leh-leh-leh-lehhh!”

And Kenny yelled: “That’s what you get!”