Death and Fire

Paul Klee, Death and Fire

       Jean first met Willard on the elevator on a rainy afternoon in March. They were alone on the elevator. He was tall, slender and bright-eyed. She was not good at estimating someone’s age, and It was especially hard for her to say how old he was. If there was anyone he reminded her of, it was the fictional Dorian Gray. He was wearing a neon yellow slicker on which droplets of water glistened like yellow diamonds. He had an iPhone in his hands. She recognized it by the Apple logo, the white apple with the bite taken out of it. Willard was using his thumbs with the incredible dexterity that everyone under thirty—Jean was forty-six—seemed to have mastered. For someone like Jean for whom the expression “all thumbs” was a synonym for digital clumsiness, the speed with which his texting thumbs could maneuver around a minuscule screen astonished her. 

       When Willard  glanced at  the peculiar look on Jean’s face, he immediately stopped texting. She could see he was embarrassed. He could probably indulge himself with his iPhone in a taxi or in first class on an airplane, but he apparently understood it might be impolite to do it on the elevator of a luxury Park Avenue apartment building in which the tenants were for the most part, contrary to the reputation New Yorkers had for being crass and unsociable, refined and polite. 

       “I’m sorry,” he apologized,  blushing. He slipped the iPhone into the capacious pocket of his slicker.

       “Oh, don’t be sorry,” she was quick to reassure him. “It’s perfectly all right. It’s just that  I’m having trouble with my new iPhone,” she said, taking hers out of her pocketbook.  “I envy your skill with yours. What model is it?”

       “An iPhone 6,” he said. At that moment the elevator in its swift ascent had stopped at her floor.

       “I get out here,” she said, somewhat flustered, still holding her iPhone as she stepped out of the elevator.

       “Let me help you,” he said, following her off the elevator with the graceful, quick step of a ballet dancer.  He was tall,  as tall in fact as her husband, who at that moment was off somewhere in Africa hunting. She had forgotten which country.

       “Would you like me to look at it?” he asked as the elevator door closed behind him with a swoosh sound that she couldn’t recall being fully conscious of before.

       “You want to look at my iPhone?” she asked. He nodded and after a moment’s uncertainty on her part,  she handed it to him.

       “Your floor is different from ours,” he said, turning her iPhone over in his hand, examining it, front and back.

       “The color scheme was my idea,” she told him, referring to the unusual color scheme and design on the walls. “I was inspired by Klee’s playfulness.”

       “Of whose playfulness?” he asked.

       “Paul Klee, the painter,” she said, and with her next breath asked, “Do you live on the top floor?” 

       “Uh-huh,” he said, turning on her iPhone. “This is one of the new ones,” he said. “I haven’t seen this model before.”

       “I’ve been on the elevator more than once with a woman going up to your floor,” she explained. “She had blond hair. Like mine. But I’m not sure how old she was.” 

       “Uh-huh,” he said absently as his thumbs moved so fast on the screen of her phone that she felt she was watching an aboriginal trying to light a  fire by rapidly rubbing sticks together.

       “Was she a relative of yours?” she asked.

       “The woman on the elevator,” he asked. No,” he said without taking his eyes or thumbs off her iPhone. She couldn’t believe  he could carry on a conversation while the screen,  in response to his thumbs,  was kaleidoscopically flashing colors, as if the native had succeeded in starting a fire  But then his thumbs began to  move more slowly, as if he was closing in on the quarry, as a hunter might stealthily move toward  a deer in a thicket. He appeared to be holding his breath as he proceeded. 

       “Ah,” he said as his thumbs stopped moving, suspended like the wings of a hawk alighting.  “I think this is the problem.”

       “What is? she asked.

       “It’s complicated,” he replied.

       "I’m sure it is,” she said, feeling somewhat patronized.

       “There’s so much involved,” he said. She noticed beads of perspiration in the down on his upper lip. 

       “There!” he exclaimed. His search had apparently ended. He let out his breath as she had once seen a loin clothed  Hawaiian diver do after surfacing with pearls in his mouth.

       “You fixed it?” she asked.

       “Uh-huh,” he replied. “You probably messed it up by futzing around with it.

       “Futzing?” she asked. He didn’t explain futzing  because his mind was already elsewhere.

       “What is your name?” she asked as he handed her back the phone.

       “‘Willard, ma’am. Willard Shaler.”

       “My name is Jean. Jean Harlow.”

       “Glad to meet you, ma’am.”

       “Does my name mean anything to you?

       “No, ma’am. Should it?”

       “No, no,” she said. “There was an actress, but that was a  long time ago. She was known as the Blond Bombshell.”

       “Like Madonna?” he asked. 

       “Well, yes,” she said. “Sort of.” Jean’s father had been a big fan of Jean Harlow, who died in 1937 at the age of 26. Though they were both Harlows, they weren’t related. The actresses last name was Caprenter, but Jean’s rather shy, tightlipped  father felt there had been some kind of bond between himself and the glamorous actress he, though  had seen her only a few times in late night movies. 

       Willard was looking again at the walls and the playful design.  “Does your place have walls like this?” he asked.

       “No,” she said. “But it’s interesting.”

       “Interesting?” he asked. But before she could answer the iPhone in her hand rang.

       “Who can this be?” she wondered aloud. “Oh,” she said, looking at the number that was calling. “It’s my husband. Hello? Howard? Where are you? Yes, I lost track. So that’s where you are. You’re what? Going where? So you won’t be back next week. No, no. That’s all right. Where am I? I just got off the elevator at our place. No, I’m not alone. Who? A young man who lives above us. No, not that family. They moved out some time ago. This gentleman just fixed my iPhone. What? Oh, he’s technologically  literate, I’m sure.”

       When she hung up, she asked Willard, “Where were we?”

       “We were talking about your place,” he said.

       “Of course, Of course,” she said, as if she was resuming walking barefoot across a shallow stream, one stepping stone at a time. “Would you like to see it?”

       “Sure,” he said.

       She opened the door, which was a complicated process because her place had more alarms than a bank. Holding the door open for him, she smiled like the doorman downstairs. Willard hesitated. He seemed discombobulated by her deference. “Please come in,” she urged him. 

       When he entered, he stopped after taking a few steps.  Looking around, he was awed. “I feel like I’m entering  the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

       “You frequent the museum?” she asked.

       “No, but my class went there on a field trip when I was in the sixth grade,” he explained. 

       “That must have been interesting,” she said.

       “What’s that painting over there?” he asked, walking over to one of the many paintings on the walls. It was a painting of a naked woman. 

       “That’s the Blonde Bombshell herself, or that’s what I call her anyway.”

       “You mean the actress you mentioned?”

         “That’s right. Jean Harlow. Or at least that’s what my hunch is.”

       “She looks kind of funny,” he observed.” He was staring at her vagina was like a black bush and her blazing long blonde hair looked like the trail of a comet. 

       “What style is it?” he asked.

       "What style of painting?"

       "Yes,"

       “Expressionism,” she said, following behind him as he made his way among other paintings.

       “What’s this one?” he asked, stopping in front of a painting of Adam and Eve. It looks different.”

       “That’s a copy of a fresco, a wall painting by Masaccio. It’s called The Expulsion from Paradise.’Somebody had painted over the genitals, but when it was restored the fig leaves were removed.”

       “it isn’t expressionism?” he asked.

         “No,” she said. “Masaccio was long before that. He was one of the first to use perspective. He died when he was twenty-six.” After a short pause, her curiosity got the better of her. “How old are you, Willard?”

       “Me?” he said, nonplussed.  “Take a guess.”

       “I’m terrible guessing someone’s age.” she admitted.

       “I’m eighteen.”

       “Eighteen?” she repeated trying not to show how surprised she was. She was thirty-nine, but she told people she was twenty-eight so she didn’t have to people make cracks about Jack Benny, who was perenielly thirty-nine.

       “Sweet eighteen,” he said. “But people tell me I could  pass for twenty.”

       "Oh?" she said, wondering if he was pulling her leg. “I’ll bet you could easily pass for twenty-one,” she added, just in case he was pulling her leg.

       An awkward silence was broken when his iPhone rang. The iPhone 6 ring, called the Marimba, coming from the pocket of his slicker, sounded to her like the faint tintinnabulation of a grasshopper playing on a tiny xylophone.

       “Excuse me,” he said taking the call. “Linda? Is that you? I’m so sorry. I lost track of the time. Where am I? I’ll explain later. I promise.”  Then he hung up, the phrase revealing how idioms linger on long after the circumstances that had occasioned them had disappeared.  In the old days one ended a call on a wall telephone by reaching up to place the ear piece back on the phone cradle. So one hung up on a cell phone by snapping it shut or pressing a button.  Was the Linda on the phone  the woman on the elevator? When Willard left, Jean still did not know what  futz meant? Lighting a joint, she looked it up in her old Merriam-Webster, the binding of which was coming apart. Futzing  was derived from the Yiddish phrase arumfartsn zikh, literally, “to fart around.”

       With the Merriam-Webster still in her hands, in something of  a daze, she went over and stood in front of “Blond Bombshell” for a minute. Then she sat down on one of the half dozen modern wooden Danish chairs in the  Wishbone style that were scattered throughout the large room. Through the window she could see Manhattan stretching down below to the East River, and to the boroughs beyond.

       “Farting around,” she said with a laugh. Then she became reflective. Was Willard really eighteen?Finally, she grew sad, thinking of Masaccio and Jean Harlow, both of whom  had died young,  at twenty-six, sparing them the disillusionment of growing older, unlike Paul Klee who lived to be sixty and died of a painful, wasting illness that was reflected in a late, smaller, expressionist  painting called Death and Fire, a framed copy of which she hung up on the wall opposite the toilet.

A Murder of Crows

Van Gogh, A Flock of Crows

One of the definitions of murder is “a flock of crows.” It’s in Merriam-Webster and other dictionaries. but a literal-minded fool at the Audubon Society says it should be stricken not just from scientific but also from sensible discourse generally, to which I respond with the following story:

         It was early March, with freshly fallen snow on the ground, and John and his four-and-a-half- year-old toddler Molly, whom he tended to coddle,  were taking advantage of the blue sky and windless day to get a little relief from their cramped living quarters. They were walking hand in hand, with their earmuffs and boots on, when  an  Audubon  member on horseback passed by, making a condescending tip of his cap to both father and daughter.  

       Molly  pointed to the horse, telling her father, “Hossy,” and he had replied,  “Yes, Molly, hossy.” 

Not far from the father and daughter, the  Audubon horse deposited a small pile of steaming manure on the snow, triggering a strange series of events John  would not soon forget. Molly who had watched the horse’s  rump all the way, pointed to the steaming pile and asked her father, “Poop?”

       “Yes, Molly,” her father answered. “Poop.”

       As if continuing a game they were playing, her father, to turn her attention away from the poop,  pointed to a scraggly, prickly evergreen bush to their left,  under which crouched a cat. “Look, Molly,” her father said. “Under the bush. There’s Kitty.”

       “Kitty?” Molly asked excitedly. That’s what they called the pink-eyed feral albino cat they had seen a number of  times before. John had never seen an albino cat before, nor had anyone else in the neighborhood because they were rare as hen’s teeth and horse’s toes. Molly squinted to see the cat whose whiteness had lost its luster and was now a sickly gray as a result of its homelessness. 

       Kitty would not allow anyone to get close enough to pet her, not that any adults would be  tempted to, and even most children looked upon Kitty with fear and a few with loathing. “Ugh!” John had heard one disgusted teenage boy say. “Somebody should shoot that ugly bitch.”

       John looked around, trying to figure out what Kitty might be stalking. She appeared to be just hiding when he had first noticed her, a short while before, but now she seemed in a predatory posture, with her gaze fixed on the poop. Skittish and unsociable, never knowing where her next meal was coming from, Kitty looked starkly undernourished. But John never heard of cats eating animal or human excrement and doubted Kitty ever would stoop to poop, even if she were starving.

       “Daddy, wook,” Molly said, pointing again, this time at the huge ancient sycamore tree, to the right. With her slight speech impediment she pronounced her l’s as w’s. Her father assumed, or at least hoped, she would outgrow the impediment. But who could say for sure that a slight speech impediment was not the precursor of far more serious genetic problems.

       “Look at what, Molly?”  he asked. “The sycamore tree?” Because of a genetic glitch in their make-up, the bark of sycamore trees lacks the gene that makes the bark of most trees elastic, like human skin. Consequently, as the width of sycamore trees expands with growth, the bark splits annually in response to growth and then subsequently heals, giving a sycamore tree the appearance  of a scarred veteran of sylvan wars. Since sycamores are long lived, sometimes as long as one or  two hundred years, they look scarred to death, pale but in some respects like beautiful corpses. That Poe never wrote a story about sycamores seems shortsighted on his part.

       “No, Daddy,” Molly said, shaking her head rapidly to emphasize she was not pointing to the sycamore tree. “Wook at the bwack birds.” 

       “God!” John exclaimed, looking at the tree, astonished at the number of crows perched quietly in the leafless sycamore. Had  hundreds of crows been perched there for some time without his having noticed them or had they just suddenly swooped in noiselessly?  “Where did they all come from? How long have they been there?” John asked. Of course, he was asking himself these questions, not his toddler daughter. The silent, motionless crows occupied every limb and branch of the tree, making the sycamore look black instead of its customary mottled white and gray. John always found crows fascinating when dense flocks of them swirled in the sky like a black tornado. He wondered whether it was only one crow who led the rest of them to suddenly change direction,  or did they all collectively instinctively know which direction the flock was going,  as an oil spill flows in the direction dictated by the composition of the soil and tilt of the landscape.

       John’s wife Daisy had been murdered late at night, coming alone home from the tavern, carrying that white pocketbook whose glass mesh exterior glittered under the streetlight  like tiny diamonds. Because the neighborhood they had moved to was crime-ridden, he had tried to dissuade his wife from carrying the bag, especially at night, because it was an invitation to the predatory gang that lived in the nearby housing project who roamed about the neighborhood after dark. Turning state’s evidence, one of the gang members had subsequently confessed to the police that she, John’s wife, had refused to give up her bag, even with the knife at her throat held by a hopped-up member of the gang. When she started screaming, the hopped-up member had slit her throat. 

       There had been nothing of value in her bag, nothing but lipstick, a compact, and other makeup. Daisy couldn’t pass a mirror without refreshing her makeup. She had been eighteen with a clear, glowing complexion when he married her, but after the birth of Molly, the bloom  in her cheeks had disappeared completely, like a rose in an autumn drought. His drug addiction hadn’t helped, he guiltily admitted. If he hadn’t lost his well paying job as a county weights and measurement inspector after a random drug test, they would not have had to give up their ground floor apartment in a well kept up building in a better neighborhood on the other side of the city. He had never smoked or drank, not even coffee or tea. Growing up, he had avoided all stimulants, except for crack cocaine. Haunted by guilt he had vowed after his wife’s death to kick his addiction, for Molly’s sake, but he hadn’t managed to yet. He had a two-year degree from a community college, where he had studied animal husbandry. Weights and measures was not the first job he had lost because of drugs.

       “Here, Kitty,” Molly called when she finally saw the crouching cat. But the cat hadn’t heard her. It hadn’t heard her not  because her voice was faint but because almost all albino cats are deaf, as white cats in general are inclined to be.

       As if on cue, one of the crows flew down from the sycamore and alighted not far from the pile of poop, but instead of approaching the pile, the crow strutted back and forth, glancing all around  as if wary of predators. Did the crow consider John and Dolly potential predators? He doubted it because crows  were supposed to be among smartest creatures in the animal kingdom, with the exception of course of homo sapiens, the thinking hominid. Crows had been around homo sapiens long enough to know which humans to avoid.  But if it wasn’t John and his daughter  the crow was wary of, was it the albino cat under the prickly bush? Was the crow even aware of the cat under the bush? John was pretty sure it was aware, because not only are crows smart, they also have acute binocular vision. They can see much farther and clearer than people. Why then did the crow suddenly turn its back on the bush where the cat was hiding and stand stupidly in the snow on one foot, staring at the pile of poop from which it was only a foot or two away?

       The albino cat took advantage of the crow’s apparent lapse of alertness by stealthily and with increasing speed racing  toward the winged creature, hoping to pounce on it by surprise. But as if it had eyes in the back of its head, and saw that the cat was in lunging distance, the crow acrobatically lifted itself by its wings into the air six feet above the ground.  Instead of sinking its teeth and claws into the bird, the cat sank its pink nose deep into the pile of poop. Before the cat had regained its balance and composure, and extricated itself from the poop, the birds in the sycamore took flight en masse, and swooped down upon the cat, clawing and pecking at it unmercifully. In a half a minute the bird was bleeding and blinded, one of its eyeballs hanging by some kind of thin ligature or integument out of its bleeding eye socket. Afraid that the crows would turn on him and his daughter next, John  picked up his frightened daughter and hugged her protectively. Turning his back on the carnage, he put more distance between him and the crows  by walking rapidly away. When John dared to stop and look back, the cat was a writhing blob of blood-soaked skin, bones,  and intestines. Most of the crows had already taken to the blue sky. John felt relieved that he and Molly  would not be attacked by the crows. 

       “Daddy,” Molly murmured, “Kitty dead.”

       “Yes, she is,” he answered somberly, taking out a tissue and drying her dripping red nose, “or she will be soon.” He wondered as he continued to carry his distraught daughter in the direction of their dingy living quarters whether the crows had lured Kitty out of the prickly bush with that solitary crow feigning carelessness. Were crows that smart? Had they attacked Kitty simply because she was an abomination,  a freak whom mother nature had assigned crows the responsibility of culling from the herd of normal living creatures? He was not sure  what to make of it all. He wondered if Molly would always remember the shocking incident when she became an adult. When he looked up, not far from where they lived,  and saw a black murder of crows so large that it blocked  out the sun,  he was sure he would never forget. 

                                                                                                               Robert Forrey

The Butterfly Effect

Edward Lorenz, The Butterfly Effect

       When Foster, a bachelor, late in his career moved to that section of the country that had the reputation of being notoriously backward, a national joke, depicted in the movies and on the radio as the source of unending amusement if not hilarity, he did not know what to expect. How much of it was true, how much urban prejudice? He moved to Hedgewater Creek only because the position he had accepted at the Snidely Foundation,  however much it might be a step down socially and culturally, was a step up professionally and financially. It was a step he compulsively felt he had to take to complete his professional career cycle. That was how he viewed it. A career cycle. Why come so far professionally in life and not take the last step? Once his three year contract was up, he could clear out, and retire to some idyllic spot where he could pursue his study of the Butterfly Effect. He had been bitten by the butterfly bug as a ten-year-old  and had never gotten over it. He  got hooked on lepidoptera the way some kids did on cigarettes or drugs.  He couldn’t for the life of him remember people’s names, but he unfailingly remembered the tongue-twisting latinate names of the lepidoptera groups, the clades and nesting clades, of butterflies.

       The Snidely family  had offered him the directorship of the Snidely Foundation sight unseen. So he had returned the vote of confidence by not visiting the town or meeting the Snidelys before accepting the position, adopting the “don’t look a gift horse in the mouth” philosophy.

       “Welcome to Hedgewater Creek, Mr. Foster,” the mayor of the town greeted him at the railroad station the overcast day he stepped off the train, the only passenger to do so. Foster had noticed as the train pulled into the Hedgewater Creek station that there was a sign under the one with the name of the town which read, “Where Southern Hospitality Begins.” Perhaps that slogan, which he later learned was the town’s official motto, explained the mayor greeting him at the station, though it wouldn’t explain the eeriness of the station.

       “Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Foster responded to the mayor’s greeting.  Foster’s terrible memory for the names of people had only gotten worse with age, so he took to adopting  or creating generic names or titles for people.  Foster had expected to be met at the station by at least one of the Snidely sisters, a wing of whose “mansion,” as they called it, he would be renting,  but there was no woman, no other person, anywhere on the platform. The mayor looked and sounded like Paul Ford, the comic actor who had had a long career on television  playing incompetent blowhards. The mayor’s striking resemblance to Ford and the eerie emptiness of the platform had made Foster suddenly feel the  late career move he was making was not really happening, that he was dreaming or even worse that he was awake but trapped in one of Paul Ford’s long running television shows. It was odd trains of thought  like this that made Foster wonder at times if he was slipping into Alzheimer’s as his younger brother had.

       As if if reading his  mind, the mayor said, “Gertrude was going to join me, but something came up  that she had to deal with. She sends her apologies.” Foster tried to remember which of the sisters he had talked to on the phone was Gertrude. Was she the oldest, the youngest  or the middle sister? He was glad to be reminded by the mayor what her name was, whichever one she was, because he had already forgotten the first names of the other two. “She asked me to drive you to the Snidely mansion,” the mayor said, relieving Foster of the luggage he was carrying. “Did you bring anything else?”  

       “I have a trunk that will be shipped later,” Foster explained. In what other the region of the country, Foster wondered, would the mayor carry your luggage and chauffeur you from the railroad station to your destination? 

       At the mansion the Mayor introduced him to the three sisters, Gertrude, the oldest; Floppy,  as Florence the youngest was nicknamed; and Gwendolyn, the middle sister. All three were spinsters. None of them were unattractive, but they were very pale, rather ethereal, to put if politely, bloodless to put it bluntly. They had had a younger brother, but he had been kidnapped, or so the sisters had believed. The Snidely Foundation had so much money that they thought it inevitable that a Snidely would eventually be kidnapped for ransom. The five-year-old Phillip had been playing in the sandbox in the backyard of the mansion when Gertrude, who was watching over him, had run into the house when she remembered she hadn’t turned the oven on to roast the duck they were going to have for dinner that evening. As she was turning  on the stove, the telephone rang. It was Gwen who was downtown who wanted to know how many yards of muslin Gertrude wanted them to buy because Floppy couldn’t remember. Then Floppy got on the phone to tell Gertrude she had just seen Elaine Dewey, the girl who had fled town five  years earlier when she was pregnant, and her oldest brother was rumored to be the father. Gertrude later claimed she hadn’t left little Phillip  at the  most for five minutes, but when  she went out, he wasn’t in the sandbox. In a panic, she ran in wider and wider circles, calling him, at first anxiously and then hysterically.

       The stagnant creek near the mansion was dragged twice and the twenty acres of scraggly woods surrounding the creek had been thoroughly gone over by the troop of local Boy Scouts, led by their scoutmaster, a young Baptist minister. No trace of the boy had ever been found. The ransom note the Snidelys had expected to receive had never arrived.

        But the first time he was in the Snidely parlor, on the day that was the missing Phillip’s birthday,  Foster saw what resembled a shrine in one corner of the room where a candle on a table burned reverentially.  On the wall were framed photographs of Snidely kin, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles, most of the clan, dating far back, and at the center was a  framed chiaroscouro photo, perhaps taken with an old family camera, of the missing Phillip. Foster got as close as he could, because there was something about the photo, in the dim light,  that made his scalp tingle and his heart beat.

       

       Foster couldn’t get to sleep that night. Phillip in the photo looked exactly like him at that age. He still had the photo of himself in a trunk, but he was reluctant to take it out because then he was afraid he would never get back to sleep. He had had a rare, childhood disease and had been in and out of hospitals from the age of three to five. Those years were a blur to him and in his mixed-up state of mind he suspected he and Phillip had got mixed up in the hospital at birth, notwithstanding their wide difference in ages.

       His train of thought got so outlandish, so bizarre that he returned not to his previous idea that it was a dream but instead he was a character in a stupid unbelievable short story written by a talentless, rank amateur who didn’t know what the hell he or she was doing, and that there ought to be  a law requiring aspiring fiction story writers to get a license, after following some kind of instruction or schooling, before they could begin  trying to create credible people and places and plots with beginnings and endings, fiction that creates not so much the illusion as the essence of reality. Barbers and heart surgeons, plumbers and airplane pilots have to get licenses. Why not writers of fiction? Writers of fiction are like God. In the beginning there is nothing, a void, and the writer creates a world that he should people with credible characters who live and breathe, who love and suffer, who capture the imagination of readers, interesting  and inspiring, uplifting and enlightening them.

       In today’s fast, frantic world, where  time is of the essence, when global warming is breathing down our necks, the frying of  the planet being  only decades away,  it is not the long-winded who are invaluable, however profound and gifted they may be. Who has the time and patience for War and Peace? Only the rare and the privileged. It is the time not for Tolstoy, but for Chekhov. 

       Yes, Paris is a beautiful city to be creative in, but most people, especially most Americans, live in Podunk. Most Americans  are as exiled from culture as Ovid was from Rome. This is not the time for long love letters. For the lonely living  lives of quiet desperation, an “I love you” note will do. If you can’t find the road back to the Athens of America, make do with Appalachia.

       A little can mean a lot. The Butterfly Effect means that a small change can lead to great changes. A butterfly flapping its wings two weeks earlier can help create, can contribute to, a hurricane. This is the case in any dynamical situation, not just in the weather.

       Get out of the cycle of career advancement. Stop spinning in circles. You will be dead for a very long time, you will be dead infinitely, though religious hucksters sell heaven as a nostrum. So make the most of time, not by making money, but by making haste to get out of the rut of routine. Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

The Apple Must Be Eaten

Masaccio, "Expulsion from Paradise"

          Jean first met Willard on the elevator on a rainy afternoon in March. They were alone on the elevator. Tall for his age, he was slender and bright-eyed. He was wearing a neon yellow slicker on which droplets of water glistened like yellow diamonds. He had an iPhone in his hands. She recognized it by  the Apple logo, the white apple with the bite taken out of it. Willard was using his thumbs with the incredible dexterity that everyone under thirty—Jean was forty-six—seemed to have mastered. For someone for whom the expression “all thumbs” was a synonym for clumsiness, the speed with which his texting thumbs could maneuver around a minuscule screen astonished her. 

When Willard  glanced at  the peculiar look on Jean’s face, he immediately stopped texting. She could see he was embarrassed. He could probably engross himself on his iPhone in a taxi or even in first class on an airplane, but he apparently understood it might be impolite to do it on the elevator of a luxury Park Avenue apartment building in which the tenants were for the most part polite and sociable.  

“I’m sorry,” he apologized,  blushing. He slipped the iPhone into the capacious pocket of his slicker.

“Oh, don’t be sorry,” she was quick to reassure him. “It’s perfectly all right. It’s just that  I’m having trouble with my new iPhone,” she said, taking hers out of her pocketbook.  “I envy your skill with yours. What model is it?”

“iPhone 6,” he said. "I've grown very attached to it."

At that moment the elevator in its swift ascent had stopped at her floor. 

“I get out here,” she said, somewhat flustered, still holding her iPhone as she stepped out of the elevator.  

“Let me help you,” he said, following her off the elevator with the graceful, fast step of a ballet student.  He was as tall as the average male adult, as tall in fact as her husband, who at that moment was off somewhere in Africa hunting, with his gun and cell phone. She had forgotten which country,

She had come to realize that in  the digital age a home without a boy was at a disadvantage. For someone her age and sex, every boy was a whiz when it came to technology.  For him, a problem with an Apple computer, iPad, or iPhone was probably child’s play.  

“Would you like me to look at it?” he asked her as the elevator door closed behind him with a mechanical swoosh that she couldn’t recall being fully conscious of before.

“Look at my iPhone?” she asked. He nodded and after a moment’s uncertainty, in which he looked around at the decor of her floor, she held it out to him.

“Your floor is different from mine,” he said, turning her iPhone over in his hand, examining it, front and back.

“The color scheme was my idea,” she told him, referring to the unusual color scheme and design on  the walls. “I was inspired by Mondrian's Cubes and Squares.”

“Of whose?” he asked.

“Piet Mondrian,” she said, and with her next breath asked, “Do you live with your mother?” 

“Uh-huh,” he said, turning on her iPhone. “This is one of the new ones,” he said. “I haven’t seen this model before. My father believes technology is a pact with the devil," Willard said. 

         "What does he do?" Jean asked.

         "He's a big wheel at Apple."

“I’ve been on the elevator with your mother,” she said, suddenly recalling. “At least I think I have. She has blond hair? Like mine?”

“Uh-huh,” he said absently as his thumbs moved so fast on the screen of her phone that she felt she was watching a silent mini-Charlie Chaplin  movie. 

“Does your father live with you?” she asked.

“No,” he said without taking his eyes or thumbs off her iPhone. "I don't see him much." She couldn’t believe  he could carry on a conversation while the screen,  in response to his thumbs,  constantly shifted.  But then his thumbs began to  move more slowly, as if he was closing in on the glitch, as a hunter might stealthily move toward  a deer in a thicket. He appeared to be holding his breath as he proceeded.

“Ah,” he said as his thumbs stopped moving, suspended like the wings of a bird about to alight on a branch. “I think this is the problem.”

“What is? she asked.

“It’s complicated,” he replied. 

‘I’m sure it is,” she said, feeling somewhat patronized.

“There’s so much involved,” he said. She noticed beads of perspiration in the down on his upper lip. She could see he had not begun to shave yet.

“There!” he exclaimed. His search had apparently ended. He let out his breath as she had once seen a Hawaiian pearl diver do after surfacing.

“You fixed it?” she asked.

“Uh-huh,” he replied. “You probably messed it up by futzing around with it.

“Futzing?” she asked, but he didn’t answer. His mind was already elsewhere.

“What is your name?” she asked as he handed her back the phone.

“‘Willard, ma’am. Willard Shaler.”

“My name is Jean. Jean Harlow.”

“Glad to meet you, ma’am.”

“Does my name mean anything to you?

“No, ma’am. Should it?”

“No, no,” she said. “There was an actress, but that was a  long time ago. She was known as the Blond Bombshell.” 

“Like Madonna?” he asked. 

“Well, yes,” she said. “Sort of.” Jean's father, whose last name was the same as Jean Harlow's, had been a big fan of hers, and had carried a pin-up photo of her when he was an eighteen-year-old soldier in Vietnam, as soldiers the Second World War had pin-ups of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth.

Willard was looking again at the walls and the playful design.  “Does your place have walls like this?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “But it’s unusual.”

“Unusual?” he asked. But before she could answer, the iPhone in her hand rang.

“Who can this be?” she wondered aloud. “Oh,” she said, looking at the number that was calling. “It’s my husband. Hello? Howard? Where are you? Yes, I thought that’s where you were. You’re what? Going to where? So you won’t be back next week. No, no. That’s all right. Where am I? I just got off the elevator at our place. No, I’m not alone. Who? The young man who lives above us. No, not that family. They moved out some time ago. He just fixed my iPhone. What? Oh, he’s pretty smart, I’m sure.”

When she hung up, she said to Willard, “Where were we?”

“We were talking about your place,” he said.

“Of course,” she said, as if she was resuming walking barefoot across a shallow stream, one stepping stone at a time. “Would you like to see it?”

“Sure,” he said eagerly. 

She opened the door, which was a complicated process because her place had more alarms than Fort Knox. Holding the door open for him to enter first, she smiled like the doorman downstairs. Willard hesitated. He seemed somewhat discombobulated by her deference. “Please come in,” she urged him. 

When he entered, he stopped after taking a few steps.  Looking around, he was stunned. “I feel like I’m entering  the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” 

“You frequent the museum?” she asked.

“My class went there on one of our culture field trips,” he explained. 

“That must have been interesting,” she said.

“What’s that painting over there?” he asked, walking over to one of the many paintings on the walls. It was a painting of a naked woman.

“That’s the 'Blonde Bombshell,' or that’s what I call her anyway. It’s a painting of a once famous Hollywood actress. Or at least that’s what my art consultant thinks.”

“Which actress?” he asked, examining it more closely. 

        "Jean Harlow. The Bombshell herself."

       “She looks kind of funny,” he observed.” Her vagina was like a black bush and her blazing long blonde hair looked like the trail of a comet. “What style is it?” he asked.

“Expressionism,” she said, following behind him as he made his way among the many paintings. She concluded he must be precociously responsive to art. Her husband had not looked twice at any of the paintings.

“What’s this one?” he asked, stopping in front of a painting of Adam and Eve. It looks different.”

“That’s a copy of a fresco, a wall painting by Masaccio. It’s called ‘The Expulsion from Paradise.’ I call it 'The Apple Must be Eaten.' Somebody had painted over the genitals, but when it was restored the fig leaves were removed.”

“This isn’t expressionism,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “Masaccio was long before that. He was one of the first to use perspective. He died when he was twenty-six.” After a short pause, her curiosity got the better of her. “How old are you, Willard?” 

“Me?” he said, nonplussed.  “I’m twelve.”

“Twelve?” she repeated trying not to reveal her surprise.

“But I  can pass for fifteen or sixteen,” he added.

“Yes, I’m sure you can,” she added, trying to sound casual, trying to adjust to the realization that he was still, strictly speaking, a preteen. 

The silence was broken when his iPhone rang. The iPhone 6 ring, called the Marimba, coming from the pocket of his slicker, sounded to her like the faint tintinnabulation of a grasshopper playing on a tiny xylophone.

“Excuse me,” he said to Jean as he took the call. “Linda? Is that you? I’m so sorry. I lost track of the time. Where am I? I’ll explain later. I’m on my way. Right now. I promise.” He was gone in seconds, leaving the door open as he left. Who was Linda? Apparently not his mother. Possibly an older futzy female  of thirteen or fourteen? What did futz mean? She looked it up immediately in her Merriam-Webster. It was derived apparently from the Yiddish phrase arumfartsn zikh, literally, “to fart around.”

With the Merriam-Webster still in her hands, she went over and stood in front of Blond Bombshell  for a minute. Then she sat down on one of the half dozen modern wooden Danish chairs in the  Wishbone style that were scattered throughout the large room. Through the window she could see Manhattan below, stretching to the East River, and to the boroughs beyond.

“Farting around,” she said with a laugh. Then she became reflective. Finally, she had a good cry for herself.

Marry-go-round

Bride to Be, Norman Rockwell

      When Brandy heard that the Morgans, the incompatible couple with two children who had fought next door like cats and dogs for two years had finally separated and were getting divorced, she reflected, and not for the first time, that marriage was the Auschwitz of our age. “We’re prisoners not of Nazis but of ourselves,” she told Mark, the divorced divorce lawyer who had handled her second divorce and who also was Jewish. They lived not far from each other in a northern New Jersey town that was just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, which was just a fifteen minute drive away over the George Washington Bridge. As she had told Mark about marriage when they had gotten to know each other better, “No institution is better constituted to make bitter enemies of people who had previously been, if not madly in love, at least had been infatuated enough to get married.”

      Brandy had been miserably almost suicidedly married twice, but she had had sexual relationships with a half dozen men when she was separated from her first husband. Collectively those men had helped reveal to her what she had come to think of as the horrors of heterosexuality. Her mother, who had divorced her father when Brandy was three, was one of the forty-nine women who had helped establish the National Organization for Women. Brandy was not a card carrying feminist, but she was proud of and had loved her mother who had died of breast cancer at the age of fifty-five. On her deathbed, her mother, heavily drugged, had asked her to promise she would never marry again. Brandy had promised but only because her mother was not in her right mind. Brandy had not wanted to make the promise because she was sure she would never marry again anyway and didn’t want to think she needed a promise to prevent her from again tying what she called, with her genetic linguistic divagation, “the naught that binds.”

      She and Mark had an all-holds-barred relationship, which she had never had with any man before. They had become close friends but there was an almost incest taboo against their developing not only a sexual but even a slightly romantic relationship. Brandy did not have a brother, but if she had had she was fairly sure he and she would have the kind of feelings for each other that she and Mark shared. Very personal but platonic. Mark had joint custody of a daughter, Arden, who was the same age as Brandy’s daughter Melanie. Arden and Melanie were like loving sisters, and Brandy envied them for that, for she had neither a brother or sister. Being an only child was a cross she had borne stoically, unwilling to admit until she was an adult just how much she missed not having a sister.

      Brandy and Mark were frequently able to drop Melanie or Arden off at the other’s house when something came up, Brandy having a nanny and Mark a spinster aunt both of whom welcomed the girls getting together because they loved sleeping under the same roof and in the same bedroom with each other, which ever house it happened to be.

      Brandy’s first marriage had been childless. She had married someone she had met at the Harvard Business School, where they were both studying for an MBA, but he was a WASP from an old New England family and she a Jew whose maternal grandfather had been a scrap dealer on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Could any union have made less sense? Could any couple have had less in common? She liked martinis. He was a teetotaler. Her MBA was from Harvard. His law degree was from Yale. She was a liberal Democrat. He was a conservative Republican.

      “How unqualified people are to make one of the three or four most important decisions of their lives,” Mark had said, shaking his head the first time Brandy had consulted him professionally.

      “Isn’t that the truth?” she had admitted, embarrassed to have fallen back, an Ivy League MBA, on a banal platitude on an occasion that called for, even cried out for, deeply felt originality of expression. “My god!” she thought to herself. “How trite.” So she had added, somewhat desperately, in an attempt to make up for her platitude, “They make one of the three or more most important decisions of their lives not just once, not just twice, but over and over again, as if they were Hollywood stars.”

      “Yes, Hollywood stars,” Mark had agreed, banally embracing her platitudinousness, pouring more fast-drying cement around their feet, showing Harvard Law had not been completely successful anymore than Yale Business School had in flushing out the verbal sediment that accumulates in the reservoir of human inarticulateness. Municipal fire departments periodically allow for as long as eight hours the water from opened hydrants to gush forth like miniature Niagaras down gutters and sewers, flushing the sediment that accumulates in water lines. If there were some comparable ability in human beings to periodically babble nonsensically, like zealots speaking in tongues, then the world might be linguistically less of a cul de sac.

      “Mommy,” Melanie had said to her mother out of the blue one day, “Why don’t you and Mark get married?” It took Brandy a minute or so of hemming and hawing before she regained her composure.

      “Me and Mark get Married, dear?” she answered. “Whatever put that idea into your head?”

      “Arden asked me yesterday,” Melanie said. “I told her I didn’t know but I would ask you.”

      “Why Mark and I don’t get married?”

      “Yes,” Melanie said.

      “Melanie, I’ve already been married twice,” Brandy said, wishing she could utilize her Auschwitz metaphor to convey the suffering she had experienced in her two marriages, but that was the last thing she ever wanted to try to explain to the person she loved more than she had ever loved anybody, particularly infinitely more than she had ever loved her two ex-husbands.

      “Arden thinks it doesn’t make sense for us all to be living in different houses,” Melanie said.

      “Hmm,” was all Brandy said, wondering what might have prompted Arden to ask Melanie the question in the first place. “Did Arden say she had asked her father the same question?”

      “No, she didn’t say,” Melanie said. “But do you think he’s thinking about asking you to marry him?”

      “No,” Brandy said. “Of course not. We’re just good friends. The way you and Melanie are good friends.”

      “I almost forgot,” Melanie added. “Arden wants to know if she can sleep over tonight.”

      “Has she asked her father?”

      “No. She wants to make sure it’s OK with you first.”

      “But she slept over the night before last,” Brandy pointed out.

      “That seems like a long time ago,” Melanie said. And then she asked, “What are we having for supper Mommy?”

      For twenty-four hours Brandy debated whether she should telephone Mark and arrange to see him. While she was debating, Mark called her. He wondered whether they could get together for a talk. She readily agreed they could. They decided to meet at the reservoir on the outskirts of the town. There was a path around the reservoir, which was a favorite rondezvous for spooning young lovers, but during the day the path was usually unoccupied. On their first time around the reservoir, Mark talked idly and did not say what he had wanted to talk to her about. Instead, he had stroked his rabbinical kind of beard more than was customary.

      As they began their second time around the reservoir, Brandy asked him if there was something he wanted to talk to her about.

      “There certainly is, Brandy.” They stopped walking and he stared at the reservoir, avoiding looking at her. When he finally looked at her, directly in her eyes, he said, “Brandy, I’m thinking of asking someone to marry me.”

      “Oh, my god!” she thought. “This cannot be!” Couldn’t a divorce lawyer handle a marriage proposal any better than this? It was like a crack auto mechanic chronically forgetting to change the oil in his Audi Avant. They silently resumed their second walk around the reservoir. Her mind was racing. Her heart was pounding. A pregnant teenage girl had drowned in the reservoir several years before. At first the police had suspected foul play, but then had decided it was probably suicide, though they released a statement saying why she had downed was still under investigation. Brandy now thought of the drowned girl, thought of her committing suicide because she was pregnant and not married.

      “I wish I was handling this better,” Mark told her after another long silence in which they were coming to the end of their second circling of the reservoir.

      “What’s preventing you from just asking her?” Brandy asked, finding it hard to continue to speak of herself in the third person and failing to hide the feeling of impatience and even contempt that she felt for Mark at the moment.

      “Because she’s one of my patients,” Mark said. “She just got divorced.”

      “She?” Brandy stammered. “She? You mean it’s not me?”

      “You?” Mark asked, confounded, looking down at this patent leather shoes, as if staring at his own red-faced reflection.

      “I thought,” she said, trying desperately to extricate herself from this humiliating situation. “I thought you . . .” She fell speechless as they began their third go-around of the reservoir, which she now realized was more of an oval than a circle. “That’s it,” she said aloud, in a sort of free association, “I’m just an old eccentric.”

      Mark put his arms around her to comfort her. “Brandy! Brandy!” he said, crying along with her. “It wasn’t you I was thinking of asking to marry me.”

      “Of course not,” she blubbered disconsolately, acknowledging bitterly to herself that if Mark had proposed she probably would have accepted. For that she felt she could never forgive herself. Never!

The Noggin

Betty Grable

      Two Negro teenagers from the inner city were strolling along the boardwalk of the beach on a late summer Sunday afternoon in the mid-1940s, self-consciously trying to look nonchalant. But they were  aware from the stares they received that they didn’t fit in, that they were not welcomed. All those white  people on the beach, lying on towels and blankets, getting suntanned.  If it weren’t for his hair and lips, Moe could have passed for white, but Riley was almost as black as the ace of spades.  Because they were not welcomed, except as dishwashers and latrine cleaners, Negroes were rare on the beach, located a half-hour trolley ride north of the  city.  Moe and Riley had never been to the beach before, had never seen the  white sand, the cresting waves crashing on the shore, with the blue ocean beyond. 

      They had heard about the  amusements  and the rides, but it was the  notorious attraction, The Noggin, at the southern  end of the boardwalk, that they were there to see. Knocking stacked metal milk bottles over with three balls was a staple on boardwalks and in  carnivals, as were  cotton candy and Fat Ladies, but hitting Negroes on the noggin was a rare, if not unique attraction.

      Moe and Riley heard the barker explain the purpose of the of The Noggin  in the racist spiel that he shouted over and over to passersby: “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hit the Negro on the Noggin. Hit the Negro on the noggin three times in a row and  win a gorgeous Betty Gable kewpie doll you’ll display proudly on your mantel or display case.” Betty Grable, the blond Hollywood actress, had been the favorite pinup for G.I.’s during the Second World War, so the barker had named the alabaster  kewpie dolls with the blond mane after her to make  males feel  they had to win a doll to prove their manhood. The barker had learned during the war that a Statue of Liberty doll could not compete with a Betty Grable kewpie. Patriotism had to take a back seat to pulchritude.  

On this late Sunday afternoon, as on Sunday afternoons generally, there were very few transient down-and-out inner city Negroes lined up  behind the canvas to stick their heads through the hole. There  were few Negroes because there were few white customers. The crowd on the boardwalk and the sunbathers on the sand tended to thin out on late Sunday afternoons as  Monday loomed like novice dentists or a conference of undertakers. So Moe and Riley found themselves getting closer  to The Noggin as the white spectators in front of them thinned out. They watched for a while, but when the hole in the canvas became unoccupied, Riley and Moe decided to leave, having seen more than enough. But the barker, who had had his eye on Riley for several minutes, interrupted his spiel to say sotto voce to him as he was turning to leave, “Psst! Hey, boy, You want to earn a fast two bucks for a half hour’s work?” the barker had spoken to Riley but it was  Moe who answered.

      “Two bucks?” Moe complained. “Is that all?”

      “Two bucks ain’t  nothing to sneeze at,” the barker said, annoyed that Moe was answering for Riley.

      Though he had figured it out for himself already, Moe asked, “What does he have to do for the two dollars?”

      “Do you know what the federal minimum wage is?” the barker asked Riley, ignoring  Moe. 

      “No,” Moe replied, again answering for Riley. 

      “It’s only forty cents an hour. That’s what it is,” the barker said to Riley.

      “Come on, Moe, let’s get out of here,” the disgruntled Riley said, having also figured out what the barker wanted him to do. But Moe, always playing the angles, as he did when he played billiards, wanted to continue the palaver.

      Eying the dolls on the shelf, Moe said, “Only two dollars for getting his brains  knocked out?”

      After a moment’s deliberation, the barker flipped a ball to Moe, saying, “Here, Sambo. See how light that ball is?”

      After catching the ball, Moe gave it a couple of test squeezes. Affecting surprise, he flipped the ball to Riley. 

      “I guess these balls can’t do much harm,”  Moe told him.

      “You mean can’t do me much harm. What do you think I am,  a numbskull?” Riley asked.

      “Late Sunday afternoons all we get are cockeyed drunks,” the barker said to Riley. “They couldn’t hit you in a month of Sundays.”

      “I’m not going to let nobody knock me on the  noggin on Sunday or any other day,” Riley said, folding his arms defiantly on his broad chest. 

      Moe fixed his gaze on the barker for several seconds, as if trying to size him up. “I’ll tell you what, Mac,” Moe told him. “If you’ll give my bro two bucks and me one of those dolls up there, it’s a deal.”

      “What!” the barker interjected, feigning astonishment. “Do you know how much dolls costs?” 

      “Probably no more than two bits,” Moe replied. 

      The  barker made a long face as he said,  “I probably should have my head examined, but OK I’ll give you the doll and Sambo the two dollars. Now go around to the back,” he said to Riley, “and put your head through the hole. But remember. Don’t look up. Keep your head down.  Getting hit in the face can do more damage than getting hit  on the noggin. And don’t forget  the house rule. You got to keep your head in the hole till your half hour is up. Otherwise you don’t get  a dime.” Sullenly, Riley went back and stuck his head through the hole in the canvas on which was painted an idyllic scene of a southern plantation with slaves harvesting cotton.

      It took only a couple of minutes for a heterogenous trio of  white high school seniors  to stop and laugh when they saw Riley’s head sticking through the hole in the canvas. 

      “This should be a cinch for you, Lefty,” the shortest of the high schoolers said  to the tallest boy, a lanky blond who wore the  sweater he had been awarded after pitching in the regional high school all-star game. 

      “Those aren’t real baseballs, Shorty. You should know that,” Lefty said to his  bespectacled classmate, who was the equipment manager of the team. “It would be like pitching a wiffle ball. I could throw my arm out.” 

      “Well, if you won’t do it I will,” Shorty said, seizing the opportunity to show he was not as short in his hunger for glory as he was in height. 

      “You?” Lefty said. “You think you can substitute for an all-star?”

      “I can try,” Shorty said,  slipping his hand into the back pocket of his jeans and pulling out a five dollar bill. He handed it to the barker, who handed him back four dollar bills and four quarters. When Shorty put down one of the quarters on the counter, the barker put down three balls. At the close  of each day the barker  whitewashed the balls to make them look like new baseballs, but by late afternoon the  balls had lost much of their white luster. 

      Rubbing his hands together eagerly, Shorty picked up one of the balls. “This is the right distance for me,” he said squinting at the canvas through his thick glasses.  He began a slow, elaborate windup, trying to imitate the windup he had seen Lefty make many times for the  team. But he didn’t  come close to hitting Riley with any of the  three balls, each of which plopped to the inclined floor of The Noggin and rolled back down to the  barker. 

      Emboldened by Shorty’s bad aim, Riley ignored the barker’s warning  and lifted up his head to look at Shorty. “He’s blind as bat,” Riley muttered. Shorty may have been blind as a bat, but perhaps by way of compensation for his visual handicap, he had acute hearing, like a bat.

      “Did you hear what that black s.o.b. just said about me?” Shorty asked, turning around to speak to Lefty. It was Billy,  the stuttering second baseman on the hight school team who answered.

      “N-N-N-No,” Billy said. “W-W-W-What did he say?”

      “He said I was blind as a bat,” Shorty said.

      In an attempt to put Shorty in his place, Lefty asked him, “How tall are you, Shorty?” 

      “As tall as Napoleon,” Shorty replied, giving the  answer he had ready whenever he was asked how tall he was.  

      “H-H-H-How tall was Napoleon?” Billy asked.

      “None of your business,” Shorty said brusquely, taking another quarter out of his pocket and throwing it down on the counter like a gauntlet. “Three more balls!” he told the barker. The next three balls got no closer to Riley’s noggin than the previous three.

      Frustrated, Shorty plunked down a third quarter. On his next three throws, he didn’t bother winding up.  Feeling humiliated by his failure, he threw the balls as quickly as possible, without trying to aim them. Not aiming made the balls  even wilder than the previous three. When his third ball missed badly and plopped to the inclined floor,  Shorty  shouted angrily at Riley, “And stop that chuckling.” 

      “I didn’t hear h-h-h-him ch-ch-ch-chuckling,” said Billy.

      “Lefty,” Shorty said, “are you gonna let him get away with chuckling at me?” 

      “I didn’t hear him chuckling,” Lefty said. “But if  those were real baseballs, he wouldn’t be acting like a smart ass. What’s he doing out here on the boardwalk anyway? He belongs in the ghetto.” 

      “That’s right. Put  him back in the ghetto, Lefty,” Shorty said. “Here, I’m putting my last  quarter down for you.”

      “Those balls are probably aerodynamically unstable, Lefty said, as if the laws of physics would be against him.

      “You can do it, Lefty,“ Shorty urged him. “Hit him on the noggin.”

      “No. I don’t want to get involved,” Lefty replied. “I might throw my arm out.”

      “I can’t believe it,” Shorty said.

      “What can’t you believe?” Lefty said.

      “How chicken you are,” Shorty said. 

      “C’m-m-m-mon, Lefty,” Billy said. “You’re not ch-ch-ch-chicken, are you?”

      “Oh, all right,” Lefty said. Reluctantly, he picked up a ball, but he didn’t wind up. He  pitched from the stretch, as if there was a runner on first. Lefty was perfectly still for a couple of seconds, as if he was staring at a batter. His head still sticking out of the hole in the canvas, Riley continued to brazenly keep his face up, staring at Lefty, who suddenly threw the ball, his long arm unwinding like a whip. Riley blinked when the ball missed him and hit the canvas, but  his head remained upright. The second ball  landed about a foot below his head.

      “Hey, Lefty,” the disappointed Shorty said. “You ain’t any closer than I was.” 

      “I wish I had some some rosin,” Lefty said, wiping his palms on his pants. 

      “Sweating, huh?” Shorty needled him. 

      The third ball Lefty threw was as far away  as the second ball had been from the first.

      “You must have thrown your arm out in the all-star game,” Shorty said sarcastically. 

      “M-M-Maybe you’re too close, L-L-Lefty,” Billy said.

      “What?”  the crestfallen Lefty said, in somewhat of a daze.  

      “He said maybe you’re too close,” Shorty said.

      “Too close?” Lefty repeated, nodding his head, as if being too close was a concept he had trouble understanding.  

      “Yes. T-T-Too close,” Billy repeated.

      “Too close,” Lefty said. I’m too close. Sure! That’s it. I’ve never been this close, not even as  a Little Leaguer.” Lefty studied the dimensions of the wide boardwalk. “Wait a second,” he said. 

      “What’s up?” Shorty asked.

      “I’ve got an idea,” Lefty said, walking backwards until he was almost off the boardwalk. ”Shorty,” he said.  “Get me three more balls.” When Shorty paid a quarter for three  more balls, Lefty told him, “Stop passersby.” 

      Shorty didn’t need to stop passersby because  when they saw Lefty standing with a ball in his hand, like a pitcher on the mound, staring at the head of a Negro sticking through the hole in the canvas, they stopped and watched, wondering what he was up to. From the increased distance, Lefty took his full windup and threw the ball with a tremendous effort, grunting as he released it. The ball hit a stunned Riley right on the nose. Even though blood started trickling from his nose, Riley refused to protect his face by bowing his head. He felt he would be betraying his manhood and his race if he didn’t hold his head up.

      “What’s going on here?” the puzzled barker asked. “He can’t throw from out there.”

      “Is there a rule against backing up a bit?” Shorty said, looking around mockingly. “I don’t see a sign saying there is.”

      “Backing up a bit?” the barker objected. “He’s practically on the beach.”

      Ignoring the barker, Shorty said, ”Groove another one, Lefty.”

      The second ball Lefty threw hit Riley on the left eye.

      “Bull’s eye!” the elated Shorty shouted, throwing Lefty another ball.

      Having turned into spectators, passersby were impressed by the speed and accuracy of Lefty’s pitches. Like fans in a major league ballpark, they waited for his third throw, as if he had two strikes on a batter. The first passersby explained to late comers what the score was, figuratively speaking.

      “Bingo!” Shorty said when Lefty’s third pitch hit Riley on the mouth, splitting his lip.  “We get the doll.”

      “W-W-W-We get the doll!” Billy said enthusiastically. 

      “Yeah, you bastards get the doll,” the barker cursed while taking a doll down from the shelf. “Now get the hell away from here.” 

      Impressed by Lefty’s feat, several of the younger males among the passersby came over to the counter, eager to show their stuff. Though Riley’s face was battered and bleeding, his half hour was not yet up and the barker was eager to squeeze some profit out of his presence.

Meanwhile, Lefty, Shorty, and Billy strolled down the boardwalk, taking turns proudly carrying the kewpie doll.