Belly Up Page 4

  It felt like I had been asleep for hours when I heard Mary’s voice in the night. She said, “Ordinary man.”

  I said, “What Mary?”

  “Ordinary man,” she said.

  I stayed silent and waited to see if she was going to give me more. Nothing else came.

  “Mary,” I said.

  “Joe Engel. What are you? Are you more than you want to be, or less? What is it you are exactly? Are you how you are supposed to be? Not higher or lower but the exact fucking level that God wants you? Don’t you ever think about what would happen if you stopped paying taxes? If you dyed your hair purple and got a pet hog? Is that something you would ever want, Joe Engel? It probably isn’t, but don’t you want to do it anyway? Do it because you can? What do you think Robert was thinking when his heart stopped while he was pulling up weeds? I bet he was like, well, fuck. I didn’t even get to the rhododendrons. I mean, honestly. What kind of man thinks about the rhododendrons? Didn’t he have bigger thoughts on his mind? No. No, he didn’t, Joe. In fact—”

  “Mary, you can stop right there,” Robert said.

  He was crouching in the corner of the room. He seemed to have been hiding in the closet and had slipped out while Mary had been running her rant. The midnight moon passed its light right through him and onto the foot of the bed.

  “Mary. I may have kept a respectable garden, but I am not the evil you think I am.”

  Mary whimpered.

  “Just because I grow carrots and organic grape tomatoes and beets and basil don’t mean I am boring!”

  “You are boring!” Mary screamed, “Even the ghost of you is boring! You aren’t even threatening. You’re just sitting there trying to convince me I should have loved you because of your Goddamn vegetable garden!”

  Robert looked fairly sad. His big palms pushed into the sockets of his hollow eyes.

  “Talk some sense into her, Joe,” said the ghost of Robert Brown.

  “Oh, no,” I protested. “I’ll just be on my way. Sounds like you two can figure this out on your own. No need for me to be here.”

  And then Mary let out a sound I honestly just did not think could come out of a human form.

  “NO!” Mary sat stark up and looked like she intended to hit me with something, “Joe Engel, the only reason I even let you stay over is because I know what you did for Wanda Green! You do for me what you did for Wanda and you do it right now!”

  This did not seem fair to me.

  “Look, Mary,” I turned to her but also tried to keep eye contact with Robert so he would feel included in the decision making process, “This seems to me like an entirely different situation. Robert is not bugging you. He is just sitting there trying to be helpful. Let him hang around awhile, won’t you?”

  “Joe Engel, this man has been hanging around my whole life! He is worse than a drunk, so much worse. Did you hear him talk about those damn carrots? If you don’t lock him up in the ground right now I’ll tell everyone you tried to get in my pants on the night of my husband’s death. I will tell everyone that while I was sleeping you put your finger in my butt.”

  She let that sit.

  “Mary!” the ghost of Robert Brown said, “Mary! How could you think such a thing, let alone say it!”

  “What, Robert? You never thought of putting your finger in my butt?” Mary said, “That’s right—you didn’t! Maybe I wanted you to put your Goddamn finger in my butt? Maybe if you had stopped thinking about your Goddamn organic strawberries, you would have put everything where I wanted it to be put!”

  Mary looked like someone had passed an electric jolt through her veins. She was standing now and her hair stood straight up and her eyes were being pulled out of her head. She menaced towards Robert. She kept yelling and walking, yelling and walking, one big terrifying step at a time. With each advance Robert dissipated. I tried to slip past the door while she was engaged with her rampage but noticed that Robert was flickering and became distracted. By the time Mary got to Robert he was gone, evaporated, no longer there.

  “Where the hell is he?” Mary said, “Robert, where the fuck did you go? I have more fucking things to tell you! You fucking coward! Are you hiding in the fucking gardening shed? Oh, I’ll find you!”

  But Mary was alone. She had scared him right back into the afterlife. I decided to get out while I could and made my way for the front door before Mary came to the same realization. It was still snowing out and it took me considerable effort to get home. More than once in the snow I had a moment of wavering. When I got back to my house, which was bare and cold, I dried myself and bundled up and went straight to sleep.

  As the days and weeks went on, I heard through the grapevine that despite the great tragedy, Mary was faring fine. I saw her at Sunday service and always offered her an extra donut, but she just scowled back. With the decrease in mature male community members, I had started taking on more responsibilities at the church. Post-service fanfare and food was a big charge, but nobody else wanted the job, or maybe there was nobody else, and I stepped in. I made lasagna and sticky buns and slow-cooked meat. When I was feeling good, I made cross-shaped sugar cookies and decorated them with red frosting to represent the blood of Christ. I wasn’t sure if it was the whispers spread by Wanda and Mary or that the women just became enamored with my food, but I have had trouble with women all my life, and all of the sudden, on Sundays they swarmed around me.

  “Joe, how do you get your cornbread so moist?”

  “Your cookies so crisp?”

  “Your pork so divine?”

  And soon enough I was married. I had been a bachelor all my days, but in the thick of my life, I found myself hitched. Miranda King was her name and she had the hair of an angel, long white-blond straight hair and bangs, and she giggled when I told her how to rub a chicken. She had been once divorced, once widowed, and lived in a grand old house up on a hill. I moved in and got to cooking. I had made it through two rounds of Christmas when—bam—the butter got the best of me and my arteries decided half time was over. The program was being suspended. There would be no more need to flank a team. I don’t remember being in the casket or watching the worms wiggle in through my ears. I remember being here and then not here. Savoring a cold glass of water and then being a cold glass of water.

  Of course I went looking for Miranda as soon as I got my legs under me. I marched back up the hill and knocked on our front door. No one came at first, so I pressed the doorbell. Finally I heard footsteps and prepared myself for Miranda’s embrace. But the person who answered the door wasn’t Miranda. It was the ghost of Nick King.

  “What the hell, Nick! What are you doing in my house?” I said.

  “This is my house, in case you haven’t noticed. And I have been here all along,” he looked smug.

  “Nick, now I realize it must have been hard dying so young and all, but Miranda and me, we have made a life for ourselves, and I think I have a right to see her and tell her I am still here.”

  “This house isn’t big enough for the both of us,” said the ghost of Nick King.

  “What the hell, Nick! Where did you come from? Did my dying wake you up? Why do you think after all these years Miranda even wants you back?”

  “Because I never left,” Nick said. “I have been in the attic. She comes and visits me on Sundays when you are cooking. Miranda and I, we had an arrangement. You were merely fulfilling her worldly needs.”

  I reeled. My ghost body turned frigid and I shivered. I became disoriented and walked through a couple planters and cursed Nick and my cloud of a soul.

  “Fucking Nick King! I am going to haunt you! It ain’t right!” I said.

  “You do that, Joe. I am pretty sure that I have been the one doing the haunting.”

  I tried to push him, but when my fist hit his cheek, it just went straight through. He tried to push me back, and pretty soon we were wailing and flailing without going anywhere because neither of us could get the resistance we needed. We were like two waves goin
g through each other, two tides briefly meeting and then receding and meeting again and it appeared that this movement would go on forever, seeing as neither of our nonworldly bodies were likely to tire out any time soon.

  “Joe!” we heard Miranda say, “Joe and Nick, you stop that right now!”

  Miranda appeared in the living room from behind the door. I let go of Nick’s collar and straightened myself out. There Miranda was, beautiful and alive and elegant and angel-faced. Her hair shone brighter, her teeth beamed whiter than I had, in my casket days, been able to recall. She looked like the picture of grace.

  “Miranda,” I said, “Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me I haven’t been living with the ghost of Nick King!”

  Miranda looked sheepish.

  “These things are complicated,” she said, “What’s a woman to do with a phantom she don’t much mind having around?”

  I felt completely eclipsed.

  “What did you really want me for, Miranda? If you had Nick up in that attic the whole time, why need me? Did you just want me for my body? Is that the truth? Is that all you ever wanted from me?”

  I was crying now. Howling and moaning.

  “Shut up, Joe.” Nick said, “Your body ain’t that great.”

  This was maybe true, and it caused me to pause.

  “I love you, Joe,” Miranda said, “I do. And I have liked making love with you. But—”

  “What!” I said. “Tell me what’s wrong with me!” I said.

  “Its not what’s wrong with you,” the ghost of Nick King interjected. “It’s what you provide.”

  At this point Miranda started to cry. “Oh, Joe,” she said, “Joe! I always loved you for you! But your chicken pot pie! Your milk braised pork with cheese! Your apple dumplings, beef stew and pecan tart! Your lemon chicken and garlic mashed potatoes and pork-tender roast! Your meatball soup and maple date bread! And sugar cookies! Oh Joe, the sugar cookies!”

  My cooking achievements lay splayed out in front of me. My mother had always said that the way to woman’s heart was through her stomach, but I never thought being in the stomach would feel so bad. I saw the women I had been with and I saw the pies I had fed them and I saw the memory of me feeding Miranda a slice of cake. I saw the ghost of Nick King lying down in the attic, seeing smoke from meals he couldn’t smell. I saw a bowl full of grits spilled on a table and Billy Green drinking Beam and Robert Brown all frowns. Billy and Rob closed towards my table of overturned grits and picked some up with their hands and slopped it in their mouth. I looked for Miranda, and where she had been standing behind me, but all I saw was Billy, who leaned in close and slithered in my ear, “Your slow-cooked lean is going to taste mighty fine with my ghost Beam.” I pulled Billy’s hand off my grits and spun looking for Wanda and Mary. All I saw was the kitchen. God’s great kitchen. Piles full of fish and plentiful wine. I saw me cooking casseroles forever. Churning out biscuits and buckets full of grub. Feeding God with my fingertips. Dipping my hand in a bowl of grits. Cooking God in a pot. Facing God through my stew. Him telling me to keep stirring. Just keep stirring. Don’t let the citrus sour. Whatever you do, don’t let the bottom burn.

  GOD’S TRUE ZOMBIES

  In Florida things are pastel. You can’t get a cup that’s bright yellow. It has to be faded. Brand-new worn out. That’s the way they make things there. Sunwashed and diluted. Light, light pink sunglasses with white, white hair. A reflection of what some living, vibrant human might look like. That’s how most everyone looks. Generally, real people don’t live in Florida. Just ghosts who are being held in Limbo for punishment of gluttony or for charging interest on loans.

  Lula May

  When the dead give birth to children, things split open and rip off, and it can be very expensive to replace, especially if you want it done by a good surgeon. When Lula May gave birth, she was already dead, but her child, to most everyone’s surprise, was living. A living child in Florida, her doctor said, now that’s an unnatural thing. What shall he do, the doctor asked, how ever do you expect to raise a living child among those who have already passed? Many of Lula’s neighbors thought the child should be sent away immediately. Put him up for adoption in a nice living state, like New Hampshire, they all said. Give the child a chance at a normal upbringing. But every time Lula considered such a thing, she realized just how much of an impossibility it was. She and her husband had never had any children while they had been alive, and now, due to some phenomena, here they were in Limbo, in Florida, with a child they could finally love and watch grow. They decided to name the child Austin. Austin Monty. And with all the love Lula May Monty’s lifeless heart could muster, she clung to that child. Raised him and reared him, watched him grow hair and grow up. She would look at him going dancing with dead girls from across the street. She would smile, her smile creasing with the plasticity of her decaying face. When Austin was old enough to go out on the town, Lula May worried that the days were shortening before Austin would have to leave Florida to go be with his own. Sometimes, Austin would look at his mother, at her wild white hair, her tattooed eye liner, her gradually rotting flesh, and he would kiss her on the check, feeling the give of the skin below, wondering where his mother’s body would move to next, and knowing it would be a place very different from where he was heading, a place where either things were burned and never buried, or a place where light ran wild and clouds were solid. He liked to dream of his mother and father bouncing in between God’s hopping stones, leaping from one rain cloud to another. But truth be told, he wasn’t exactly sure where they were destined to go. Either option, he thought, sounded better than up north.

  Cassadaga

  Cassadaga’s vibrations reach for miles beyond its city limits; all of the mediums’ psychic powers emanating out of their homes, beams of light escaping through the cracks under their doors and the spaces between their curtains. Sometimes at night, Austin would see a little stream of photons bounce around his room, knowing that there was only one place from which they could have come. Boasting the largest community of the living in Florida, Cassadaga also contains the largest number of psychics per square mile in the world. The city of seers and palms, tealeaves and chakras, meditation and communication. Come, let me look into you and tell you. Some people who visit Cassadaga are dissatisfied with the results, but naturally no one can control the spirit world. The dead are more unpredictable than the living, and often less inclined to oblige you with reasonability. In peak months, Cassadaga becomes very crowded, and with all the minds floating about, it’s hard to tell whose is whose. When the mediums sleep, they unlock their skulls and let their brains float up out of their heads like balloons, their spinal cords stretching like rubber bands out of their backs, anchoring the brains to their respective owners. Sometimes, if you come to Cassadaga late at night, you can see the brains floating out of the chimneys, bobbing in the light humid breeze, sweating, slightly, because of the crowd of souls that surround them, invisibly petting and plying the mediums’ brains to wake. Before Austin left Florida to head up north, his mother would take him to Cassadaga to get him used to being around living people. Austin would walk up to a medium and ask, may I touch you? My mother says it’s good practice. And he would feel around their arms and their skulls, sometimes happening upon the latch that unlocked their brains (We must warn you, they would say, that not all people up north have skull latches). But the mediums were often more interested in touching him than he was in touching them. A living child in Florida, they would ponder, is it possible that he’s truly alive? Or is he maybe dead and alive at the same time? Can he communicate with the spirits who have already left Florida for the next worlds? They would corner him: Tell us Austin, who do you like making love to better? The living or the dead? And Austin would blush with vivacity and reply that he had never made love to a living girl before, but that he liked dead girls very much.

  The Tampa Room

  The first time Austin took me to Florida, he took me to visit his grandparents in Tamp
a. Watch, he said to me, how the memories of the old stabilize like crystals, completely solid and unchangeable. Watch how the bungalow porches and the beach towels collage themselves into a single image, double-exposing both the past and the present, creating the illusion that time is both greater and less severe at the same time. His grandparents lived in a small, Easter-blue house. Inside the house there was a room that reeked of formaldehyde. Everything was goo and gave a little when I touched it. The photographs, the china, the pink flamingo wallpaper, the disco couches—they smelled of decay and were all slightly more pliable than they should have been. Just bending, soaked so heavy in memories that their physical substance could barely sustain the weight of their existence. On the couch a couple sat, hand in hand, jaws open, in many ways combining and exchanging substance with the couch, molding into a single, preserved entity. Gravity had taken their skin and dealt with it, and their brains were slowly dripping out of their noses and onto their shirts.