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STORIES THE MAGAZINES DIDN'T WANT
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The Satirist
The automobile graveyard lay directly below the train tracks, and without doing more than turn her head Ellen could see down among the dusty red cliffs of metal to where two African men were pushing one another in front of a cement block wall. Their brightly colored shirts were frozen in the warm morning light like painted figures in a mural. The man nearer the wall held an arm at his side, and a fast-running crimson stream poured from his fingertips to the spotted earth. The other man’s arm reached out again with its knife. The injured man, who seemed to Ellen very young, staggered and then began walking away.
The train moved, and she lost sight of both men.
That evening, in her hotel room, trying to explain the odd feeling she had had to her friend, Ellen said, “I was so far above it, there was nothing I could do to help that boy. That man.”
“Did you try to help?” asked Claire.
“What could I do?”
“Notify the conductor, I don’t know; you were there, I wasn’t.”
“There wasn’t a conductor—at least not one that I’d seen.” She had a vague memory now of a man collecting tickets. But she didn’t know where he had gone—or what her chance of finding him would have been had she stumbled through the cars (in which direction?), the typical hysterical European woman with a garish story. She could imagine the conductor’s placid face and perfect manners, the manners not really masking his dislike as he assured her, “I will report the incident once we’re in Jonestown, ma’am. What town shall I say the matter occurred in?”
She wouldn’t know what town. How could she?
Continue . . .
COPYRIGHT (c) 2018 (REGISTERED) JOHN C. BOLAND. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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The Murder of Garibaldi
We called what we did coasting. When we lost interest in a seaside village, we would drive south or sometimes west, depending on the curve of the gulf, until we found another place. On the outskirts of Cap d’Or, we picked up a hitchhiker named Helen who claimed to have come from the north with a band of smugglers. Mary, my wife for almost four years, listened to Helen’s stories with the same skeptical frown that greeted almost everything I promised. She envied Helen her adventures, but after the girl joined us Mary hid her costume jewelry in her shoes at night.
We set up our household in a four-room finca of whitewashed walls a hundred yards from the ocean. We could hear the waves, especially at night, and we could smell the beach in the morning when turtle bones spotted the shore. Our tiny house lay at the outskirts of a village that had T-shirt shops and tavernas and a police outpost. There was no hotel, but several of the businesses rented rooms to backpackers who arrived on buses twice a week. The police issued permits for lodging to visitors for a small fee.
The head policeman was a solid bearded man with bloodshot eyes who spent most of the day at a table at the Europa. He drank espresso until about eleven in the morning, ouzo from then until dusk when he climbed the stairs to his rented room. The village tended to be lawless after dark. His only assistant was a young man named Edward who played dominoes for money. I lost a small amount one evening before understanding that Edward cheated. He said he was from an inland city that had been a provincial capital before the war. His father, a tractor importer, was waiting to be executed, but it had been two years since his trial and the government had not carried out the judgment. Edward had stopped writing to his father. Waiting for his legacy made him depressed.
As they both told stories, I thought Edward and Helen might get along. It never occurred to me that Mary would interest him more. She was ten years older than the young policeman, and that was perhaps the explanation. She probably seemed sophisticated.
Continue . . .
COPYRIGHT (c) 2018 (REGISTERED) JOHN C. BOLAND. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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I'm Not Enjoying This
Last week in February, on the shore at Sanibel, Morris is in a rotten temper. Walking around with twenty thousand dollars in a travel pouch, all hundreds, not much of a bulge under his shirt, he feels he could pass for a drug dealer instead of being in fact a two-bit lawyer who is worried the banks will melt while he is on vacation. Walking the beach, trying to stay below the rack line, he looks for things to be angry about, like the fat lady who has her chair right down at the edge of the tide where he would like to walk, so he has to go around either up on the broken shells that stab his bare feet or further into the water where the seaweed can wrap his legs. This morning there are two fat ladies, weighted by saddlebag thighs, butts a few inches off the sand, probably unable to get up if a big wave came in, in which case they would have to roll out of the chairs onto their knees, scramble up the dunes, two old fat ladies about a quarter-mile apart, one with bronzed wrinkles, the other not even pinked up yet. Morris walking around two of them. There is supposed to be a lighthouse up this way that he hasn’t seen yet, walking forty minutes, and you’d think they’d have the thing where people could see it if it is supposed to be an attraction.
His daughter should have been along. “Come on, we’ll find some shells,” he’d tried, Chase responding that there weren’t any good shells only fish heads and turtle bones and she would be at the pool. Thirteen years old, she’d become obnoxious since she began growing tits. Maybe there would be a boy at the pool. Turning a boy’s head an inch counted for more than going for a walk with her father, which told him what he needed to know about their future. She’d been a great kid, and they’d had fun until the tits came along.
Chase. What kind of Jew names his daughter Chase? The answer was the kind who had married Blair, daughter of Rhoda, so now there were two generations of shiksa wannabes, Morris supporting both of them.
Most of the women he passed weren’t worth a look. Torsos too long, legs too short, eyes angry from knowing they’d lost the body- shape lottery. Whatever had happened to women who, passing you in swimsuits or even shorts, let their glances shy away so they could be properly inspected?
He could imagine his daughter thirty years on, forty years, thumping the sand with hard feet, mouth set, disappointed in someone, husband, kid, ancient diaper-clad parent. It was easy to picture her sixty pounds heavier, several decades more surly, head small, bottom wide, like a bowling pin daring the waves to knock her down.
He felt protective of the kid, so he couldn’t tell her what he saw ahead. She wasn’t smart enough to have thought that far, to the parent in a diaper.
Continue . . .
COPYRIGHT (c) 2018 (REGISTERED) JOHN C. BOLAND. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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