Audio, Mystery/Thriller 1

 

A few short stories from my book, My Cleanest Dirty Shorts,

which has been pirated and is now for sale in Indonesia. I won't even curse at the people responsible for that, but it is tempting.

MEMORY

 

"For six months I was in a room with all women, and you know what happens there, Lance."  Her voice was soft and sensitive, and only now do I realize the pain she tried to conceal.  I watched Johanna roll another cigarette, push the packet of tobacco aside and pour herself more wine. Her movements were slowed by alcohol and sorrow.  Her eyes never met mine.

"They give you only so much money a week for cigarettes and other things."  She sipped the wine and stared at some memory across the tiny student apartment.  "So many doctors ... with questions into all my life."  Her lips pressed tightly upon each other as she shook her head, refusing to unleash any emotions.  For a few minutes she was silent, but as I leaned forward to pat her arm, Johanna began to speak.  "What you see ... what you live ... dees things all become part of you.  Memories form the person."  Her eyes widened with understanding.  "Did you know that, Lance?  Oh, the things I saw," she whispered.  "Mein Gott!"

"Johanna," I said, wanting to hurry around the table and hold her, to console her with words and caresses, to be the friend she so needed, but I was becoming aware of another desire.

"Yes, Lance, I received one of your letters when I was... there."  Tapping out the cigarette, she drank the remaining wine, and refilled the glass.  As she leaned back in the chair and folded her legs beneath her, Johanna began rolling a cigarette. "But how could I read it?  Written words mean nothing there.  It was all for the moment, the now.  I fought for every second. I could not let go of the fight, even to read.

“But tell me, were there feelings and beautiful things in the letter?  Where did your words take me, Lance?  Ja, you always write such wonderful letters ... for how many years now?" 

Her hands shook so that the ash fell from the cigarette onto her pants, but she did not brush it away.  Nor, I remember, did she ever face me, but addressed her soft words and stare toward the vacant chair at our table, as if in her reality, that was where I sat.

I know I tried to comfort Johanna with words, but I can't remember them. All I remember is her sitting there, smoking cigarettes and drinking Mosel wine, and the desire I tried to suppress. And now, two years later, as I sit in the park across from her apartment building, I search through her words and try to forgive myself.  It was when the neighbor woman came to barrow the telephone that the atmosphere changed.  I remember how Johanna introduced me as her boy friend from America, then sat on my lap.  Feeling her warmth, smelling her faint perfume, I had to kiss her, had to lead her to the little mattress on the floor.

And yes, still I remember what she whispered as I stared down into her frightened, tear-filled eyes.  Yes, Johanna, memories do form the person. When we finished I sat up and smoked a cigarette, my first in four years.  And as I sat there I could feel the tension, and knew she was watching.

"I have to go, Johanna," I said, as I stood up and searched for my clothes.

"Oh Lance, not like dis ... not you and I.  You make my bed wet, then smoke a cigarette and go?"She lay in the fetal position and didn't acknowledge me as I kissed her good-bye. 

I never saw Johanna again. When I returned two days later, her name plate had been removed from the front porch directory.

I can smell pastries and coffee from the bakery up the street.  Children shout and chase a soccer ball through the park in which I sit.  I never bothered to really look at Johanna's old building.  The stone blocks are surrounded by straight mortar seams.  The tall, old window frames have been recently varnished and their brass hinges shine.  There are ugly little gargoyles under the eves, and decorative stone work borders the windows and doors.  The walls are pock-mocked from the war.  Here and there chunks of stone have been broken loose.  At chest height I see smaller holes, one after the other, forming a line from some long ago machine gun blast.  No attempt has been made to fill in these holes.  They have merely been brushed over with the same pink paint that covers the entire building.  In Germany, so many things are kept unrepaired.  THE END

Back to the Limestone Soil

 

When I look back over the years I can see the role he played in my life. The first time I saw Byron was after my first snorkeling try in the Caribbean.  I was walking home on a blazing hot day, squinting in the sun and feeling it on my shoulders, salty water dripping from my sun-bleached hair, carrying my fins and mask along the sandy village street, a couple of fish impaled on my spear.  Suddenly he was just there, laughing and pointing at my fish with his brother and sister, calling, “basura.”

I thought I had done well.  I mean, hell, I had shot a fish in the Caribbean! And I was bringing it home to feed my feral cat friend who often visited my abandoned little house and snatched lizards from the walls.  So I hurried home and searched through a Spanish/English dictionary to find ‘basura,’ only to learn it meant ‘trash.’ Even the children knew I had shot the wrong type of fish.  Well, I told myself, it was a fishing village. Of course they would know the good fish from the bad.

If I had known then that I’d watch that boy be buried, would I have changed my life in some way? It was a question I could not answer. Nevertheless, it often drifted through my mind, like a puzzling chess match, or the memory of a woman’s perfume years after tasting it on her neck.

A few years later I became involved with Byron’s mother.  Because I was often in Mexico for short periods, our time together was intense, a passion I have seldom known, nights beneath a whirling ceiling fan, cooling the sweat on our bodies, obscuring the sounds of our pleasure. Sex with Paloma was like entering the ring with a wrestler, two acrobatic kites spinning and soaring in unison to a symphony.  Night after night we pushed the limits, Paloma taunting and teasing as she went off into a world without language, that blissful female world of colors and contortions which men can only watch and absorb as boundless joy releases into their world.

For years we were lovers, and because I often returned to that village I so loved, I saw snapshots of Byron.  It seemed that each time I returned he had grown a couple of inches.

Over the years Paloma’s men came and went, and even when she was with them we enjoyed secret rendezvous, the forbidden nature of our meetings made more passionate because it was so frowned upon.  In dark hotel rooms I made her remove her skirt and secretary blouse. Then I asked her to get dressed again just so I could watch her undress all over again.

By this time Byron was a young man. The last time I saw him he was on the town pier, chasing a couple of fisherman around with two foot long pink dildo, laughing as it flopped around.  I too laughed when I saw him, so full of life, so much living ahead of him, so handsome and not afraid of anything.  He made me appreciate my life more because he was always so open and full of laughter and hearty words.

Slowly I fell in love with Paloma, and we planned to get married.  I was going to open a coffee shop in the village I so loved, the village without time.  Because I was in the U.S. and she was in Mexico, distance clouded my judgment.  I was not familiar with the day to day life of the village.  For me it was a fantasy, and that made Paloma a package deal.  I had, in my mind, jumbled her together with a fantasy life created in my imagination.

Our telephone bills became outrageous, and during out talks I got all the family news.  I learned that Bryon got a job in Cancun, and bought himself a motorcycle. Often he made $400 a night in the club where he worked. 

I had already wired the deposit for the café when the call came. Byron had been killed on his motorcycle. My life stopped. I suspended work and got on a plane to Cancun. For days I visited with family members I did not know existed, and sat for hours while they prayed the rosary. 

The morning of my third night there she woke me at dawn and led me out side.  Her other children were still asleep.  Laying on the limestone soil of the Yucatan, there was Byron’s crash helmet and motorcycle leathers. 

She asked me to wash them under the spigot so Byron’s brother and sister would not see the blood. Without another sound she was gone like a silent elf, her feet hardly touching the ground, leaving no print.

I don’t know how long I stood there as memories of the boy flooded through memory. I remembered his mother trying to pull his body from the casket. I remembered pulling her away, crying and holding her as she stared into space without an emotion flickering in her eyes.

Standing on the rough limestone pebbles, warm water flowing over my feet, I watched Byron’s blood flow out of the helmet and color the water touching my feet as it returned to the soil of his birth, this limestone that had once risen out of the sea, had once been coral. And I thought, “of course it had been coral.  He was of the sea, of this village, part of it, part of everyone who walks along its streets.

And I remembered a sign on one of the shops that one of Byron’s friends had written: “A light of Puerto Zapata has gone out.”

 

The ceiling fan whirled overhead.  The sheet over us fluttered.  I tried to hold Paloma, but part of her had died, a part beyond me or my voice.  I wanted to hold her and comfort her and love her, but her physical body was numb.  As she lay there with her back turned, she spoke about how Byron was coming to visit the next day, and all the things they were going to do together.

That night I cried