Karate Chop: Stories (Lannan Translation Selection (Graywolf Paperback)) Page 3

  He remains standing on the mat, so I ask him if there is anything else. He says he doesn’t get paid for his work, other than what he makes in tips from the customers. I explain to him that the Bangs are not at home. He says he picks up his deliveries on a bike that has no brakes. He shows me the soles of his shoes and wipes his forehead.

  Mr. and Mrs. Bang are very nice people. Mrs. Bang works for the Danish Consulate on Second Avenue, organizing trade delegations from her home country. Mr. Bang, or Lars, as he likes to be called, is a record producer. I got this job cleaning their penthouse in Lower Manhattan because I do the cleaning in his record studio. Mrs. Bang is very tall and beautiful and has blond hair. Mr. Bang is even taller, and if he is home when I arrive he gives me a high-five with his hand down low. The nameplate on the door says the Great Danes. This is a joke by some friends of theirs. I like the Bangs, but when the Bangs aren’t at home I’m always afraid they will suddenly appear in the doorway.

  That’s why I hesitate to invite the man inside. But he is sweating, and the Bangs have air-conditioning. I tell him my name is Raquel and that he must take off his shoes. His name is Gabriel. He says he has other returns he needs to pick up elsewhere in the city. I tell him I’ll give him something for his trouble. He says he won’t accept anything if it’s my own money. We smile, and he puts the tomato down carefully on the kitchen counter.

  “I don’t know what to give you,” I say, but then he says I can let him freshen up a little.

  The Bangs have a separate bathroom for guests, but my buckets and cleaning supplies are in there and the Bangs never told me what to do about guests like Gabriel. So I indicate the sink in the kitchen and he pulls the sleeves of his T-shirt up over his shoulders. Gabriel washes like my father used to in the kitchen at home in Puerto Consol. Mexican men lather themselves up to the elbows and pay special attention to the eyes and ears and nose. And when they rinse the soap away they snort like the first Mexican snorted as he staggered out of the Rio Grande. This is how Gabriel washes, and when he is done he half turns to face me. I hurry into the guest bathroom to get him a towel. The dirty ones are in a pile on the floor. The clean ones from Lumturi are folded in a neat stack. I take a clean one and go back to the kitchen where he stands dripping.

  “I could make you a sandwich,” I tell him as I hand him the towel.

  “I don’t want to be any trouble,” he says.

  I point at the tomato and say:

  “Es un jitomate muy grande, pero no puede bajar las escaleras por si mismo.”*

  While he eats his sandwich I finish up my cleaning in the guest bathroom, and when I’m done scouring the bowl I put the dirty towels and the Bangs’ bed linen in the laundry bag for Lumturi. In the kitchen, Gabriel is standing in his stockinged feet looking at the bulletin board.

  “They are tall people, right?”

  He indicates how tall he thinks the Bangs would be beside him if they were at home.

  He is looking at some photos from the Bangs’ wedding. There are quite a few on the bulletin board, and I tell him that the people who live here are from Denmark. He looks at the photo of the Bangs together with a lot of other people outside a small, white church. Everyone looks tall, though not as tall as Mr. and Mrs. Bang. Another photo shows them in wedding outfits standing by a horse-drawn carriage in front of a castle in a sumptuous green landscape. Mrs. Bang’s hair has been put up in a way that makes her look even taller. In another photo, Mr. Bang is carrying her over his shoulder. She is so high up her head is not even in the picture.

  Gabriel repeats what he said about them being tall. I tell him that the Bangs are nice people, which is true. Then Gabriel points at the horse-drawn carriage and says he thinks it’s strange for people to come to America when they have lives like in that picture. I say ordinary people may find it hard to understand, but even people like the Bangs will live abroad if it means their lives can be happier.

  I point to the blue laundry bag and tell Gabriel not to forget the tomato. I am done here. We take the stairs together without speaking. Outside the evening is warm and his bike is where he left it. It has a large box, and he has the key. He puts the tomato inside next to some other vegetables, but I don’t notice what kind. Then he bends down and turns the pedals with his hand. He scratches his head. Eventually he straightens up, takes the laundry bag out of my hand, and puts it on top of the box.

  “I’m going your way,” he says.

  He pushes the bike along beside me and we head for Snowy White. Lumturi, the Albanian laundryman, never closes. As we walk, Gabriel tells me his brother sells un-salted bread and holiday flowers in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. I tell him that’s not far from where I live. He says his bike is borrowed and he has been promised a job with a car to drive. I tell him I live with my cousin who isn’t married either, and then I point to the laundry shop on the other side of the street.

  “Take the tomato out of the box and come in with me,” I tell him. “Lumturi never saw such a big tomato in all his life.”

  Lumturi is fastening the hem of a dress. He looks up at me and smiles when we walk in. I put the laundry bag on the counter and show him the tomato.

  “Did you ever see one that big?”

  Lumturi puts his hands to his face as if the tomato gave him a scare.

  “Where did it come from?”

  “It’s from the Bangs. The laundry is theirs, too.”

  “May I?”

  Gabriel places the tomato in Lumturi’s outstretched hands. It looks funny, Lumturi standing there cradling it as if it were a baby. We sit down for a while and Lumturi tells us about his homeland, how it was like a foggy morning. You go out anyway, because a man needs to walk even if he has no idea where he is going. He walks all day and the fog does not lift until evening, leaving the man standing in the middle of nowhere. He scans the horizon for life, but there is none. He looks back over his shoulder toward the house that isn’t there. Tired legs and no place to go with yourself, that’s what it was like where he came from, Lumturi says. He hands the tomato back to Gabriel, carefully, as though it were his.

  When we leave the Laundromat we don’t know which direction to go. I ask Gabriel if he needs to deliver the tomato somewhere. He says all the groceries people don’t want are taken to a cold store in the Meatpacking District. He asks where I’m headed, and I tell him home.

  “To them?” he asks, gesturing in the air.

  “No, home to myself,” I say, and point toward the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Gabriel thinks it will be okay to take the tomato back in the morning. We can walk over the bridge together. There’s a walkway across the top, and cars and boats beneath. Far off to our right is the Statue of Liberty, which is small and green, and I tell Gabriel how I like my paella. He tells me they grew oranges back home. We talk about the things we miss, warm sand especially, and we discover we both used to tie string to cockroaches and take them for walks when we were kids.

  Halfway across the bridge I make him turn around so we can look back at where we have come from. We stare at the Manhattan skyline, which is like it always is. He adjusts my cardigan at the shoulder. I smile, and he pulls gently on my little finger.

  “Es tan pequeño,” he says and gives it a squeeze.

  Then our fingers interlock, and somewhere over Manhattan fireworks are going off. Two spheres light up the sky. They look like faces smiling. Like a kind of happiness so big it can’t all be in the picture. The fireworks explode above our heads, above the river and the skyscrapers. Gabriel tries to tell me something, but I can’t hear him. I take the handlebars of his bike and we cross the bridge. He and I and the tomato.

  ________________

  * It’s a very big tomato, but it can’t go down the stairs on its own.

  DUCKLING

  ALONGSIDE THE BIG FARM, DAD RAN A DUCK FARM, AND BECAUSE he was a clever man he earned a lot of money from it. It helped, too, that he was orderly and always had a good grip on things. He liked that. He was known for sa
ying, whenever anyone brought something up that had already been discussed, that he thought that had all been squared away. It didn’t matter whether it was me or my sister, a business acquaintance or just a neighbor he’d been talking politics with, he’d always say: I thought we’d got that all squared away. He’d say it to Mom whenever anything came between them, just like he’d say it to his other women whenever they got distraught about him not wanting a divorce.

  I remember one time one of the others came to the house. I was sitting up in the gable window where I could see everything. A car came, and this little woman got out. Mom wasn’t home, and I couldn’t hear what Dad was saying at first. He was standing on the step and she was by the hood of the car talking in a sharp voice about tidying up after yourself. I would have closed the window but I was too scared, and then he said it to her, that he thought they’d got all that squared away. I don’t think she said anything in reply. She just took this not very big plastic bag from the backseat of the car and gave it to him and then drove off.

  That was the first time I saw one of the women Dad had on the side. Actually, it was the only time, but Mom said he had several and that it all came in periods. At his funeral years later, I was too scared to look up from the hole for fear that there’d be all these women I didn’t know standing around it too. I looked at the lid of the coffin instead and told myself there was only the close family and the priest. I didn’t want to think about what Dad looked like in the coffin. And I didn’t want to think about what he would look like in time. Fluids can seep in anywhere, and the body means something to those left behind.

  Obviously I was a bit quiet for a time after seeing the business with the other woman from the window in the gable. Dad could detect things. He was sharp, and he was watching the expressions on my face. Then one evening not long afterward he looked at my sister during dinner and said that a man with a wife had no business sleeping with women outside his marriage. Not if there were feelings involved. If there were no feelings, there was no problem. Man was like any other animal who had to have his basic needs fulfilled. He had no respect for girls who went to bed with men on the first night, and he had no respect for men who beat their wives. My sister sat looking into her glass of water while Dad said that a woman shouldn’t have a deep voice either. And it was no good if she tried to be funny. She was allowed to be subtle. But a woman trying to be funny was compensating for being fat or ugly in some other way. A woman who knew she was good looking and for that reason could afford to keep quiet was a completely different thing.

  That’s what he said, and then my sister drank her water and looked across at me. There wasn’t much in it that was new. Dad had his boxes and he put things away in them, even things that contradicted each other. But I remember afterward when the table had been cleared. We were sitting in the living room watching television. He prodded me on the knee and pointed to Mom who had fallen asleep in the armchair. Her chin had dropped onto her chest, and she was twitching just beneath the skin every time her muscles relaxed. Dad smiled then and said: The way she’s sitting there, you can see that Mom’s really just an animal.

  But he was fond of Mom. He couldn’t have lived without her, because men couldn’t, he said. Men had to have wives, and my sister and I still talk about how moved he was at their twenty-fifth anniversary. He’d already lost a lot of weight then and there he was making a toast to Mom and looking down at her. He said he’d be a goner without her, and we were so fond of him. When I think about memories of him I’ve lots. We never wanted for anything, and my sister and I were allowed to do all sorts of things. I remember him tow-starting cars, and I remember when we were snowed in and he got us out. I remember the feeling of being held up high and thrown into the air without knowing if I’d be caught again. For me happiness will always be the feeling of landing in his arms.

  I especially remember how he hatched the ducklings in a big hatching machine that smelled of warm eggs and feathers. Sometimes he’d hold the eggs up to his ear and shake them to see if there was any life. If there wasn’t he’d let me throw them in among the trees, and the other ones he put back. When the ducklings were about to hatch, a little hole would appear in the egg. Then you could see the duckling pecking away in there. It was always an excitement to see if they’d survive. If they couldn’t stand and walk properly Dad would bash them hard against the floor. I remember once he gave me this weedy little duckling. He said I could see if I could keep it alive. I came up with the idea that the oven would have the same effect as the hatching machine. I took a little box and lined it with a floor cloth. I put the duckling inside and put the box in the oven. I don’t know what I set the oven on, but it wasn’t more than fifty degrees. Then I closed the oven door and sat down in front of the glass. Of course it died eventually, and he was kind and said I shouldn’t be upset. Ducklings like that almost always died eventually. We buried it together behind the machine shed in a plastic bag, and he let me fill up the hole myself.

  FEMALE KILLERS

  WHEN SHE GOES TO BED, WHICH IS EARLIER AND EARLIER NOW, HE stays up at the computer. He checks the weather, reads an online tabloid, and plays backgammon with someone who says he’s a retiree. Who wins is an open issue, and shortly after midnight the retiree logs off. So then he surfs around, visiting a variety of websites, these days thinking about things he hasn’t thought about since he was a child. People who can predict things. Clocks that stop when someone dies. Calves with two heads, and women who kill people. The latter is an anomaly, and yet he has noticed that perpetrators in TV crime shows are most often women. He knows it’s a technical thing: a desire to surprise the viewer. In the real world it’s men who kill, but even when he googles killers, Aileen Wuornos crops up everywhere, and she’s a scary one.

  Her upbringing was full of violence and alcohol, and at the age of thirteen she was pregnant. No one knew who the father was, most likely not even Aileen herself, who claimed to have had many sexual partners, including her grandfather and her brother. The child to which Aileen gave birth was placed for adoption and Aileen worked as a prostitute through school, her destructive behavior gathering momentum with charges of drunk driving, assault, and unlawful possession of firearms. Aileen ended up earning money as a highway hooker using names like Sandra, Cammie, and Susan at truck stops in Florida. Her first victim was an electrician. His car was found not far from the freshwater swamps of Tomoka State Park. In the grass by the car they found his empty wallet, some unused condoms, and a half-empty bottle of vodka. A few days later they found the electrician himself, shot three times in the chest with a .22-caliber pistol. After that she went crazy. That must have been it, he thinks to himself, with the same feeling he had when he was a child and dug up the dead birds after he had found and buried them.

  They gave Aileen Wuornos six life sentences, one for each man they could prove she killed, and toward the end of her incarceration she claimed her brain was being controlled by radio waves and she would be kidnapped by angels in a spaceship: I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock, was the last thing she said before they gave her the injection. I’ll be back, like Independence Day with Jesus. Big mother ship and all, I’ll be back.

  The odd thing about Aileen is that she was the kind of person you could have had fun with in a bar when you were young, if the chance came around. Maybe that’s why she opens doors in the mind. Doors, stairwells, and pantries. She makes tracks through the undergrowth, to places with abandoned cars. He can smell the soil and rust when he thinks about her. It’s okay, though not unambiguously so, because it feels like an opening along the breastbone, and out of the opening seeps everything a person is not supposed to touch: vipers, game killed in traffic, and liver spots. He thinks too about the child she gave up for adoption when she was thirteen. That child has to be out there somewhere, and he imagines him grown up and coming back from the public office where you can get information on your biological parents. Aileen Wuornos, the birth certificate would say, father unknown. After
ward the child would google his mother’s name and get 224,000 hits.

  Once in a while everyone wishes someone dead, though no one should ever kill. It’s human to consider it sometimes. People who drive recklessly in densely settled areas close to schools and kindergartens. Threats issued in dark alleys generally license killing, in the same way as unlawful confinement or being a soldier at war. Marginalization is no excuse, and neither is seeing a woman in the supermarket at closing time putting groceries into the shopping cart of a man like the one he remembers from childhood who used to play the banjo at get-togethers in the community hall. Balding and flabby, with thin arms and a yearning to be possessed by something big. The kind of person you feel for, the way you feel for horses and cows whose hind legs are going lame and who are unaware that the faint sound of metal on metal in the darkness of the shed is the sound of cartridges being loaded into a gun. Kill or be killed. Thoughts like that are free. Fun, even. Though not for Aileen Wuornos’s biological child. Not with 224,000 hits for his mother’s name on Google.

  He looks at his hands. His right hand is on the mouse, and when he switches off the computer in just a moment he knows he’ll feel like he did when he used to look at Playboy. Even after the magazine was hidden away he could still sense the sweet smell of spit on the glossy page. And yet he keeps clicking, to Dagmar Overbye. It’s what he wants right now: to vanish into her tiny rooms on the web, and she is dark, full, and rather out of focus, like something from a fairy tale. It’s hard to relate to her having been a real person, though she was. Sentenced to death for eight of the twenty-five infant killings she is thought to have committed. They called her the Angel Maker, and it’s the way she did it that puzzles him. She put a notice in the paper for young women in unfortunate circumstances and promised to discreetly arrange adoption for a fee. But when she got the money and the young mother had gone, Dagmar, out of her mind on naphtha and ether, did away with the child. She put one of them in the toilet, another she wrapped up in newspapers, then took her daughter by the hand and went out to bury it. During the trial it came out that as they were walking the bundle slipped from Dagmar’s hands: Mother dropped her parcel, said the daughter, and it’s impossible to imagine what it must have been like to have such a mother.