Quiet Days in Purgatory
He asked about the wife and kids and then told me that tomorrow they were burying that guy who had beaned Rasuka with the dog turd. “Mac saw what they did to him,” he told me. “There were about a hundred little holes.”
He bummed a stick off me and we smoked, staring up into the night sky. “Does the Little Dipper ring a bell?” he asked.
I avoided Rasuka and went down in the vale. It always frightens me a little to walk there at night beneath those gnarled branches. What frightened me most tonight was the thought of running into the quiet one there. I let the dog off the leash and moved slowly down. He wasn’t there, neither was anyone else. I stood at the very bottom, the wind sending leaves whizzing like thin dark birds. The dog chased something down the path where it turns into brambles and impassable wood.
Back at home, the television tried to sell me collars for my kids. You just hit a button and it shocks them into being good. “Who comes up with this crap?” I asked my wife even though she was asleep. The sex show tonight was a lot of women getting it on in prison. You know, there was a tall blonde warden with a riding crop. I switched back and forth between that and “The Banal of the Paranormal,” on which they were interviewing a woman who could predict, with a hundred percent accuracy, the moments of the day when she was going to evacuate.
Every day she gets up early and, even before she has a cup of coffee, writes two predictions (hours, minutes, seconds) on a scrap of paper. I couldn’t believe they showed her on the bowl.
I am going to call my wife to bed in a minute. It was a full day in Purgatory. I forgot about Rasuka and the Polychize, because last night was a disappointment. The boys are breathing so loud I can hear them. The dog is taking his position on the couch as my wife gets up. I hear her ankles quietly crack as the boards creak on the stairs. She is standing behind me now, rubbing my shoulders.
The guy who sells me my spittle sticks at the convenience store told me his theory about Purgatory this morning. “It’s a ham sandwich without the ham,” he said. “You got to bring your own ham.” I nodded like I knew what he was talking about. “You know that young girl who walks up and down main street—long red hair, tight ass?” I knew who he meant. “Yeah,” he said, “well check her out. She’s got enough ham to cater a wedding.”
“I always wonder about the cheese,” I told him.
“You can’t forget the fuckin cheese,” he said, taking a long toke on the piece of stiff brown rope that was his cigar.
I had to sit before The Committee at work. The old hags groused about my teaching methods, so I told them to go and ask my students what they thought of me.
“Mr. Forte,” they said in unison, “you don’t ask enough questions.” On a television screen behind them they ran a tape of me sitting at my desk, picking my nose and staring off into oblivion. The camera adjusted for a close-up and held me for five long minutes. Every once in a while I would tell the room full of manikins to calm down. I remembered the day that tape was made, I was lecturing on Plato’s Cave.
Nothing ever comes of my meetings with The Committee. I never do anything they say. I told them that I had seen roaches in the hallways of the school, and that ended the meeting. They lightly touched their beard hair and motioned my dismissal. Back in the classroom, my students had patiently awaited my return. I thanked them and began blabbing about the problems I had with my kitchen sink. Then I took the pointer off the board and whacked a couple of them in the head. The hollow thunkings resounded in the closed room and dust flew off their clothes. “Did you catch that?” I said to the hidden video camera.
This afternoon, when I got home from work, I put the little one in the carriage and went for a walk. We journeyed down by the creek. The sky was overcast and it was unseasonably cool for Purgatory. “Don’t tell me it’s actually going to rain,” I said to my son. On our way we saw a mother duck with her new babies. “So fuzzy,” he said. We saw rabbits chasing each other in a circle on someone’s front lawn. We saw red wing black birds and blue heron, jays and pigeons, swallows, purple finch. It did rain. The first time since I could remember.
We hurried over the creek bridge and ducked inside the stone shelter that some people use for parties. It is built of modest boulders and is octagonal in design. There are wide open windows, stone benches lining the walls and a huge primitive fireplace, blackened and slick with grease splatter from the annual Squirrel Meat Festival. My son wanted to get out and run around through the shadows. I just watched the miraculous rain come down and wondered whether Colonel Rasuka was going to take credit for it.
