Quiet Days in Purgatory
I almost forgot to tell you that this morning, when I got up and went down into the kitchen in my underwear to start the coffee, I looked out the window and saw Helen standing in my backyard, staring in at me. I opened the window and said, “How was your trip?”
She didn’t look well at all. “They told me that any day my check was coming from the estate,” she said.
“Who told you,” I asked.
“You know, the one made out of wood with that long nozzle of a nose for sucking you up.”
“I don’t know that one,” I told her.
She dropped to her hands and knees, craned her neck back and said, “Walk me!”
I shut the window and went upstairs to take a shower.
A little spice goes a long way when you are talking turkey meatballs. My wife has been dabbling with the recipe. My eyes sweated, my tongue burned, but I ate them all. At dinner we talked about the rain. The baby told about the ducks and I informed my wife as to Helen’s visit. She went on about her job at the hospital, where the entire nursing staff, twenty in all, care for a single dead body. “We keep waiting for old Melow to decompose, but he never does,” she said.
“What is he, a mummy?” I asked.
She took a sip of coffee and shook her head. “One of the doctors described Melow to me as a ‘degenerate slough wader who has not been beckoned’. I think he’s made out of that shit the Colonel is made of.”
After dinner I wrestled with the boys and read to them from The Purgatory Anthology of Light Verse. Their favorite is “The Man From Coolcannan”:
There once was a man from Coolcannan
Who wasn’t sure how to put his brain in
He went to the store
He bought two more
Now his wife is always complainin’
I always love to see them sleeping. Their blonde crew cuts and serious expressions, their twitches and the lidded movement of their eyes as they follow some dream. I stayed with them after singing the songs and just watched them drift off to sleep in the dim glow of the night light. Outside, the wind blew. The sound of the television from downstairs mixed its murmur with the whisper of their breathing.
I had been sitting there a long time when the dog finally came in and tugged at my shirt sleeve. Wood and I walked through the park, through the thicket of birches, to the edge. On the way back, we passed the house of The Committee. The windows were wide open and the sound of opera, played on a wind-up phonograph, drifted across the park. I saw them in there, sitting in straight back chairs, all together, listening and smoking pipes. They are definitely in with whoever or whatever is behind Purgatory. They have to be. I’ve never seen women that ugly.
Tomorrow is another day. I am so weary tonight, but I will end with one more thing I came across this afternoon. There was a leaf suspended in mid-air over the sidewalk on the way to the park. I pointed it out to my son, and we both just stared at it a long time. As we got closer, though, I saw that it was held in place by the merest strands of spider web. My son motioned to me to free it and let it fall, but I left it as it was and moved on. Now, the tired silence has brought the wind chime on the porch to life. I hope we do it tonight, so I can sleep without dreaming of the way it had been.
The Polychize flew, screeching through my thoughts this morning on the way to work. Colonel Rasuka in his bodily form was firing his pistol into the air as the threatening heads, jagged toothed and hungry for blood, whizzed by at an arms length. The Colonel’s personal body guard, the foliate, Moissac, a vegetal creature in human form, raised his long bow and fired, obliterating an eye. Things were heating up in the dripping ancient city. They were so close to the treasure. Rasuka could smell the riches above the scent of slaughter.
