According to Mahatma Gandhi,” Mavis Calhoun spoke breathlessly, “society’s coming apart at the seams, collapsing under the weight of technology gone berserk.”

Mavis and Harry Wong Smith were on ten-minute break, sipping tepid coffee in the Shop Rite Supermarket employee lounge. Twenty-nine year-old Mavis had relocated to Brandenburg, Massachusetts almost a year earlier to the day. She landed the cashier’s job in February. In his senior year of high school, Harry bagged groceries and stocked shelves.

Mavis grew up in Knoxville, on the Tennessee River. Her father worked for a lumber firm, harvesting tulip-poplar, hickory, yellow pine, red and white oak. The summer before she moved East, Mavis and her new husband, Travis, traveled to the Blue Ridge Mountains and climbed Clingman’s Dome, at 6643 feet the highest peak in the state. Mountain laurel, redbud and irises rimmed the trail. Mavis saw five wild turkeys and a brood of mottled, brownish ruffed grouse in the bush. The adult male kept up an unearthly drumming sound with its wings trying to frighten the newlyweds away. These were the sort of things Mavis told Harry when he wasn’t running price checks on kiwi fruit or chasing down abandoned shopping carts in the supermarket parking lot.

Mavis took a quick sip of coffee “Personal computers, quad speed CD-Roms, faxes, supersonic jets - ”

“There were no personal computers with quad speed CD-Rom in Gandhi’s time,” Harry corrected. “No faxes either.”

“That’s not the point,” Mavis blustered. “Personal happiness can’t be reduced to fat bank accounts or income property.”

Harry shook his head up and down as if on cue. A bogus gesture. But then, Mavis’ thinking was so outmoded and unfashionable—like something out of the psychedelic sixties, his parent’s whacked-out generation. A culture built on tie-dyed T-shirts, flower power, twenty year-olds chanting secret mantras and waiting for the millennium or Armageddon - whichever came first.

“If I owned income property,” Harry countered, “I certainly wouldn’t be busting my rump in a supermarket for minimum wage.” Harry didn’t know or particularly care if any of what Mavis was telling him was true. He could listen to her lilting voice for hours - for the better part of eternity. Stare into her cocoa-brown eyes, while watching the pouty bottom lip form syrupy phrases like ‘dervish whirling’, ‘right livelihood’, and ‘transmigration of souls’. Content was irrelevant. A lecture from Mavis on the intricacies of backyard composting would have left Harry equally spellbound.

Mavis smiled displaying a set of perfectly white, even teeth. Her shoulder length hair was straight and black, the nose compact. Except for the pearly teeth, there was nothing particularly remarkable about Mavis Calhoun. Still, the ditsy woman got under Harry’s skin like an itch. Not so much an itch as an irresistible craving.

Harry had his own theory about the woman. Mavis Calhoun was 'covertly' beautiful. The woman possessed an untapped potential for hidden loveliness - a confused landscape of precious imperfections. Hers was not the fragile beauty of classic line and unblemished texture but, rather, a quality resembling the unpredictable exuberance of wild flowers - of catchfly and purple coneflower; the eagerness and zeal of chicory and yarrow; the scruffy, unassuming ardor of scarlet phlox and Queen Anne's lace.

In a rash moment of over exuberance, Harry once told Mavis something of the sort, but the guileless woman balked, didn’t know what to make of the odd remark.

Back hand compliment or sincere flattery? Mavis simply rolled her chestnut-colored eyes and spoke of something else. Harry never broached the issue again. In recent weeks, when Mavis tried to snare him with the metaphysical mumbo jumbo, Harry focused on her teeth. The two, sturdy slabs, top front - so durable and immaculate - were symbolic of the woman’s spiritual perfection. Twin alabaster tiles, unblemished by nicotine or periodontal complications.


“Five thousand six-hundred, fifty three people of Chinese origin presently live in Tennessee,” Mavis said. “I looked it up in the state census report.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Thought you might want to know.”

“Total population?”

Mavis leaned forward with a dreamy smile. “A tad under five million.”

Harry wondered if the Chinese community of Knoxville didn’t feel a bit lonely at times. “What’s your husband’s take on Eastern philosophy?”

Mavis scowled. “I showed Travis a picture of Gandhi in his white robe; he said the mahatma looked like ‘a flea-bitten faggot.’”

Travis Calhoun dropped his wife off at work two or three nights a week. A heavyset man, most days he was unshaven and wore torn jeans with a rebel flag sewn on the back of his dungaree jacket. Married at eighteen, they were high school sweethearts. One pregnancy early in the marriage ended in a miscarriage. Mavis never became pregnant again. When Harry mentioned the stillbirth, Mavis swallowed hard and looked away. For the remainder of the day, outside of an occasional price check, there was no carefree banter, and Harry had the presence of mind to leave the woman alone. “No, I wouldn’t think your husband would be overly interested in Eastern philosophy.”

Mavis splayed the fingers of her left hand and studied the wedding ring. The tiny diamond, more like a chip than a bona fide, precious gem, glinted weakly. “That’s why,” Mavis confided breathlessly, “It’s such a blessing to find a spiritual twin soul.”

Another of Mavis’ cockamamie notions held that Harry Wong and Mavis Calhoun were twin souls. She shared this intimation recently in a mad gush of esoterica and Harry, too smitten with her infuriating loveliness, couldn’t disagree. “We really should be getting back,” he said and gulped the last of his coffee.


In the late seventies, Harry’s parents traveled to Guilin in southern China to adopt a baby girl. The orphanage, which sat at the base of an outcropping of limestone pinnacles rising six hundred feet in the air, offered the Americans a package deal. Six months earlier a boy with a wandering eye was born in a nearby province. The distraught parents brought the child to the baby home. One eye gazed curiously about the lobby while the other eye flitted indiscriminately in space. “Our child has a wicked demon,” the mother said and, with her husband, hurried quickly away.

Strabismus: an imbalance of the eye muscle in which one eye cannot focus. A simple operation at Children’s Hospital in Boston rid Harry Wong Smith of the ancestral curse. An act of gratitude, the Smiths included the biological parents’ last name on the birth certificate. East meets west. Harry Wong Smith - a semantic absurdity. Harry never used his middle name - not on signatures, certainly not in public.


One afternoon in early April, Harry visited the Brandenburg library. “I need information on Bernoulli’s principle.”

“Could you be a bit more specific?” The reference librarian was completely bald but sported a thick black beard as though his facial hair had been relocated from the naked skull.
“Bernoulli studied planes,… aerodynamics.”

The librarian came out from behind the desk and led Harry up a flight of stairs to the rear of the building. “You should find what you're looking here.” He pointed to a row of books at chest height and went back to his post. Harry selected three volumes and took them into the reading room. Daniel Bernoulli. He found a lengthy reference in the appendices of the second book.

The bulge in the upper surface of an airplane wing makes this surface longer than the lower portion. Because the air above moves faster, it exerts less pressure creating an upward imbalance.

Harry began making notes. At the photocopier, he reproduced several diagrams, went back to the table where he had left the other books and began putting together a bibliography of sources and quotes.

Less pressure is exerted by a fluid that is flowing faster than ...

“Fancy meeting you here!” Mavis Calhoun was standing on the far side of the table clutching a sheet of paper in her hand. She wore a summery cotton dress and a string of pearl. The impish smile tore his heart out, churned his mind to mush. She raised the sheet up over her head like a trophy. “You’re looking at the happiest woman in the world! That man,” she gestured in the direction of the reference librarian, “gave me this list of the one hundred favorite novels recommended by the American Library Guild.”

“And you’re going to read everyone.”

“A to Z!” Mavis grinned. “Problem is, I don’t recognize much of any of the authors. My reading to this point has been somewhat …erotic ”

“Erratic,” Harry corrected.

“Yah, that too.” Mavis bent over the table and positioned the sheet under his nose. “How’s this one?”

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

- Harry’s English literature class read the novel in his junior year. “I think you’d like it. It’s about this girl growing up -”

Mavis leaned forward across the reading table and impetuously thrust a hand over his mouth. “No, for God’s sake, don’t say a word! Don’t reveal a solitary thing that happens, because I’m going to read it cover to cover. Tonight!”

She ran off in the general direction of the fiction shelves. For a solid minute after Mavis was gone, Harry could feel the pressure of her soft fingers against his lips. He should have kissed them - thrown her down on the reading room floor and made mad debauched love to the young woman with the American Library Guild list. Instead, Harry collected his notes and quietly left the Brandenburg Public Library.

When he reached home, Harry took the three library books into his bedroom and laid them on a desk next to the study guide. The assignment was due in a week. Tomorrow after finishing his shift at the supermarket, he would copy out the rest of the material. Friday he would cobble together the artwork - drawings, graphs and scientific formulas. The science project would be finished with time to spare.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

- it was a masterpiece to be sure. Mavis was probably already lying in bed next to her Neanderthal, redneck husband scanning the dust jacket. Maybe she would slog through the first fifty pages, at best, and then lose interest. Forget fifty! Harry doubted Mavis Calhoun would survive much past the first twenty. Everything with Mavis was slap dash, close enough for jazz. She was a sprinter not an intellectual, long distance runner. The other day at the supermarket, Mavis had gone off on a rant about some newfangled metaphysical theory. Harry couldn’t even recall the half of it. He couldn’t remember because, when Mavis held court, Harry zoned out. The verbiage fell away and, in its place was a pristine, immaculate silence, a communion that transcended the spoken word.

Harry showered and brushed his teeth. After blow-drying his hair, he cross-referenced what he had learned about Bernoulli’s principle in the first book with the other two. Yes, everything was under control. When air was put in motion, the turbulent fluid created an imbalance in pressure above and below generating thrust, a forceful shove.

Mavis Calhoun entered the Brandenburg Public library reading room, causing Harry Wong Smith’s feet to imperceptibly levitate an infinitesimal fraction of an inch off the ground. It didn’t fall under the rubric of aerodynamics and certainly wasn’t the sort of thing he could use in a science project, but the phenomenon was every bit as real! Mavis Calhoun and Bernoulli's principle were all tied up in a metaphysical blur. The woman from Knoxville, Tennessee generated so much emotional thrust that she literally lifted Harry out of his being, sent him careening into the cosmos like one of the romantically beguiled characters in a Chagall painting.


Flavor-of-the-month. Through the summer, Mavis immersed herself in the German existentialists, Kurt Vonnegut, Baba Ram Dass plus a hodgepodge of Sufi mystics and poets. There was no mention of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or any of the other offerings on the ALG summer reading list. Regarding her eclectic, literary preferences, Harry had no opinion one way or the other. To witness Mavis’ exuberant passion for truth (or whatever else she hankered after) was worth the price of admission.

One day Mavis cornered Harry in front of customer service. “I found this enchanting poem by the Persian mystic, Rumi, but I’m not sure if I understand it.” She recited from memory leaning hard on a southern drawl that made the verse sound childishly commonplace:

Since we’ve seen each other, a game goes on.
Secretly I move, and you respond.
You’re winning, you think it’s funny.
But look up from the board now,
look how I’ve brought in furniture
to this invisible place, so we can live here.

When she finished, Harry blinked a half dozen times and stammered, “It’s beautiful but I haven’t a clue what the poet’s talking about.”


Three weeks later, Harry was restocking yogurt in the dairy aisle. Nellie Higgins from customer service approached from frozen foods. A pear-shaped woman, Nellie pranced about the store on her elephantine frame as though she were auditioning for the Boston Ballet. “A smashed jar of spaghetti sauce in aisle six needs seeing to.”
Harry stepped back from the refrigerated dairy case. “Mavis Calhoun’s husband just showed up with a dozen roses,” Nellie added with a sour smile. “Laid the flowers down with a flourish and left. Just like that! Not a word.” Nellie thrust her hands into her pink smock. “Sure wish someone would bring me a dozen roses for no good reason.”

“I’m sure he had his reasons - good or otherwise.”

“And what’s that suppose to mean?”

“Nothing,” Harry muttered.

Nellie grinned stupidly. “Don’t let puppy love cloud your judgment.”

Harry felt his cheeks burn. That Harry was sweet on Mavis was old news. Still, no one at the supermarket had the right to make fun of their friendship. Not when the cashier at express checkout was having an affair with the assistant manager, a sordid back-alley romance, and one of the meat cutters was dating a fourteen year-old. “I suppose you heard the rumor.”

The remark caught Harry off guard. “I got ears. I hear things,” he replied noncommittally.
“Mavis’ husband worked in a textile mill down south. Got into a squabble with another redneck.” Nellie lowered her voice and moved closer. “A lovers’ triangle... he killed the guy.”

“That’s old news,” Harry lied.

“Police claimed it was self defense. Never even went to trial.” Nellie picked up a plastic tub of Dannon cherry yoghurt. “Still it’s just hearsay. Could be a lot of bunk.”

Harry felt nauseous, light headed. He recalled an incident in early December. Travis Calhoun showed up midway through the afternoon shift, a heart-shaped box of chocolates tucked under his beefy arm. With a boyish grin, he laid the chocolates on the counter, blew an impetuous kiss and hurried away. Mavis pawed at the gift-wrapped box as though it contained an assortment of worthless rocks before stuffing it under the counter. Never once - not even when Travis mouthed the kiss - did he actually look at his wife; rather, his eyes ricocheted aimlessly off the customers, store fixtures, a cardboard display hawking Oreo Cookies at half price.

“What’d he kill him with?” Harry asked.

Nellie put the yoghurt back in the box and shrugged. Even when she was standing still, her unruly hips seemed to be decamping in a dozen, different directions. “Bare hands, a knife, crowbar, gun - what’s the difference? One punk’s rotting in a premature grave, while the other’s playing Don Juan passing out long stem roses.”

A lover’s triangle. Was Mavis, Harry wondered, the unnamed, third party? Or was the adulterous woman the dead man’s wife? Harry stifled the urge to retch. “But it’s just a rumor?”
“Mindless prattle,” Nellie confirmed, shaking her head vigorously up and down. “People run their mouths. Say any fool thing that pops into their demented heads.”

“Aisle six. Spaghetti sauce.” He went off in search of a mop and pail.

*****

Through the winter, Harry sent away for college catalogues and admission forms. His father graduated from Northeastern University on Huntington Avenue across from Symphony Hall. Five years in the cooperative studies program earned him an engineering degree plus an offer from one of the more prestigious firms in the student placement program. Harry’s marks in math and the sciences were consistently high, and Mr. Smith was encouraging his son to follow his own example.

In the Sunday supplement to the Brandenburg Gazette Harry read an account of a Wall Street broker who left his two-hundred thousand dollar job to manage a bed and breakfast in Booth Bay Harbor, Maine. “Best thing I ever did!” the ex-broker boasted. A banker from the Midwest took early retirement so he could devote the remaining years of his life to saving wild horses. “What wild horses?” Harry wondered. And if wild horses live freely in natural surroundings, why did they need saving? But then, as Mavis would say, it was all a matter of ‘karmic destiny’. Engineer, classical musician, supermarket bag boy, rescuer of wild horses, innkeeper - the possibilities were limitless.

Harry dutifully filled out his college applications and mailed them off with the processing fees. His private fantasy was to spend the next thirty years at Shop Rite pricing cherry yoghurt, stocking dried apricots, basmati rice and farm-fresh vegetables. He’d marry a woman like Mavis Calhoun, start a family. To hell with conspicuous consumption! They would live in a tiny matchbox of a house - cramped, but perfectly cozy - drive second-hand cars, scale back their expectations to nil. From Brandenburg center, a 40-minute drive south on 495 brought you to the sand dunes at Horseneck Beach where the all-day parking fee was five dollars. There was the free, bird sanctuary in Norfolk, a children's playground alongside the zoo just outside the city and a local art museum. You didn’t have to be rich, just frugal. And, of course, you’d need a clone of Mavis. A Mavis facsimile was absolutely essential.

*****

“Doing anything Saturday night?” Mavis asked the first week in November. Harry said that he wasn’t. “Come for supper. I told Travis all about you and he’s dying to meet you.”
The idea of Travis Calhoun, bigoted redneck, adulterer and homicidal maniac, dying to meet Harry Wong Smith was so absurd it demanded an equally absurd rebuttal. “Did you tell him I lust after you day and night?”

Mavis burst into hysterical laughter. “You’re the funniest boy alive!” She could hardly catch her breath. “I’ll remember that one, for a hundred years.” Harry smiled weakly and went off to check his weekly assignment.

On Saturday late in the afternoon, Harry pulled on his best, wrinkle-free Dockers and a green sport shirt. Smearing Bay Rum cologne on either cheek, he grabbed his windbreaker and headed out the door.

The Calhouns lived at Fox Run Estates, a low-rent apartment complex, three miles north on route fifty-seven. The single bedroom apartment featured a small living room and dining area off the kitchen. She was alone when he arrived. On a coffee table was a picture of the couple at their senior prom. Travis Calhoun, macho blond hair curling over his ears and fifty pounds leaner, looked dashing in a white tuxedo. Mavis glowed with an utterly ditsy joie de vivre. Peering through the open doorway into her bedroom, Harry could see an antique white dresser and matching bed tables.

“Stove’s on the blink,” Mavis said. “Won’t be fixed till morning. Travis is picking up Chinese food. Can I get you something to drink?”

“Soda’s fine.”

Fifteen minutes later a blue pickup truck with a smashed side door pulled up in front of the building. Smelling of hard liquor, Travis Calhoun entered the kitchen. He went directly to his wife, kissed her on the mouth and placed a brown bag on the kitchen table. “Larry, is it?”

“Harry,” he corrected. Travis grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down a bit too forcefully. Lurching unsteadily to the refrigerator, he palmed two beers, placing one on the table next to Harry’s empty glass. Twisting the metal cap, Travis rubbed the rim of the bottle with a greasy hand and took a deep swig, draining half the contents before he came up for air. “Like music?” He drifted toward the stereo.

Before Harry could answer, he added, “Shitkicker. That’s what we listen to mostly. Dwight Yokum, Delbert Clinton, Willie Nelson, Clint Black.” He fiddled with the dial until a twangy melody burst through the static. “Country and western. Good-ole-boy music.”

“That’s sort of nice,” Harry said, removing the cap from his beer. He filled the cup three-quarters full and took a sip. “Nice lyrics.” The tune, a rollicking, hillbilly song, told the story of a lovelorn cowboy who loses control and shoots up the jukebox in a bar; it was genuinely funny, as original as it was clever - a silly story told, in verse, of a lover’s despair and redemption. Harry took another drink.

Travis opened the containers while Mavis set the table and passed out silverware. “Let’s eat!”

When the meal was finished, Travis plucked two more beers from the refrigerator and hustled Harry into the living room. “Mavis’ a gem and I’m the luckiest sucker alive.”

“You’re the luckiest and I’m the second luckiest.” Harry wasn’t sure what he meant by the obtuse remark. The Smith’s were teetotalers. The first beer had softened Harry up; the second transported him to a state of magnanimous euphoria where he was beginning to appreciate Travis Calhoun as much if not more than his goddess-of-a-wife.

“It’s like I won the lottery when Mavis agreed to marry a worthless skunk, white trash, son-of-a-bitch like me.” Tipping the bottle vertical, Travis nursed the suds at the bottom of his beer through the longneck and into his waiting lips. “She don’t ever shut up though... always with the fucking Eastern philosophy.” He placed an arm around Harry Wong Smith’s shoulder and squeezed hard as though they were blood brothers.

“Small price to pay, though.” Harry’s speech was slurred. Was he being too familiar with Travis Calhoun, a man who, except for Nellie Higgins wild accusations, Harry hardly knew?
In response, Mavis’ husband jumped up and got more beer. “A deaf mute,” Travis sniggered. “When I lose my temper ‘cause she’s cackling on and on about some skinny-assed faggot in an oversized-diaper, I tell Mavis that I’m gonna divorce her. Marry some ugly bitch who can’t neither hear nor talk.”

Harry burst into uncontrollable laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Mavis called from the kitchen.

Again Travis leaped up, but this time rushed into the bedroom instead. When he emerged, he was carrying a revolver. He gave the oversized gun, a Smith and Wesson Model 19 with a blue neoprene grip, to Harry.

“Getting sloppy in my old age.” Travis retrieved the gun, opened the barrel and removed the copper shells one by one. “Three fifty-seven magnum. Hundred fifty-eight grain Federal jackets.”

He handed the gun back to Harry just as Mavis entered the room. “For God’s sake, Travis!”

He waved her off. “Gun’s empty, Safety catch’s on.”

“Nice looking weapon,” Harry said.

“Piece of shit. Don’t group the shots. Every bullet flies off in a different direction like goddamn birdshot.”

Mavis sat down on the couch next to Harry. She wore a cotton blouse and tan stretch pants. “Travis took the gun for repairs,” she said “but nobody can figure out what’s wrong with it.”

“Had the slugs checked with calipers. No problem. The hammer cams rearward when the trigger’s released and there’s plenty of mainspring pressure.” Under the best of circumstances, Harry would have trouble following the conversation. “Cylinder gap had some play to it but not enough to explain why it sprays lead like a shotgun.” Travis took the gun, pointed it at the far window and squeezed off a phantom round. The barrel spun with mechanical precision and the firing pin sprung forward.

“Jeez, Travis!” Mavis wrenched the gun from his hand and returned it to the bedroom.
Travis shook the slugs back and forth in his free hand like dice. “Still, who gives a shit about accuracy? Thief breaks into your house - at a distance of thirty feet you just point and shoot.” Travis fashioned a gun from his hand and index finger, squeezing off an imaginary round in the direction of his wife’s head.”

Mavis returned. “So, where were we?”


Christmas day, the Shop Rite Supermarket sponsored a free holiday meal for the unemployed and local residents down on their luck. Supermarket staff and VFW members catered the affair which was held at the veterans’ post hall in South Attleboro. Harry waited tables. Mavis helped out in the kitchen preparing box lunches for elderly shut-ins. When Harry arrived an hour early, two hundred people had already gathered, an odd assortment of somber souls.

“I don’t see how this makes any difference in the quality of their lives,” Harry grumbled. He was standing near the side entrance as a steady stream of late arrivals filtered into the room. Mavis had just come out from the kitchen to join him.

At a nearby table, three men in their late twenties were laughing a bit too loudly, but nobody seemed to care. One of the men, a gaunt, goofy-looking fellow with bad teeth, winked at Mavis. The gesture seemed more childish than brazen and further dampened Harry’s holiday cheer. “The alternative,” Mavis said, “is we don’t have a party, and they all go without Christmas dinner.” “They can’t help it,” Mavis added, nodding pleasantly to the fellow with the bad teeth.

A staticky Jingle Bells burst over the loudspeaker but no one was singing. They were waiting for the main course. You could see it in the grim set of an old woman’s jaw, the impatient squabbling of a dowdy, middle-aged couple. Frig the music! Bring on the goddamn turkey!

The kitchen doors flew open and a column of staff emerged with platters of steaming mash potatoes, green beans and winter squash. The meal was officially underway. “Got to man my battle station.” Mavis disappeared into the kitchen.

A teenage girl - she couldn’t have been any older than Harry - stank of body odor. Not the usual, day-old variety but the rancid, nose searing stench - a month’s accumulation of sloth and grunge. “Merry Christmas! How’s your meal?” Harry felt no connection whatsoever with the foul-smelling girl. She might as well have been a humanoid from some far-flung solar system impersonating the real thing. No sympathy or compassion. All Harry wanted was to finish out the shift, go home and forget about Brandenburg’s poor unfortunates.

“Another busload’s pulling in,” hollered one of the VFW workers. “Get a headcount and let cookie know how many extra meals.”

“Another busload,” Harry thought. Brandenburg was a relatively small community; how many indigents could there possibly be? With hot food on the table now, the guests were mollified. Not that anyone was singing, but the mood had lightened.

“Drivers are needed to deliver meals to the subsidized housing on Woodward Ave.” Mavis had her coat on and was fishing in her pocket for the car keys. “This was such a joy! I’m going to do it every year.” Mavis stretched, rising up on her toes and kissed Harry lightly on the cheek. “Merry Christmas, Harry!”

Around two o’clock, coffee and dessert were served and the meal was officially over. Harry went into the men’s room to pee. The three men Harry noticed earlier were smoking cigarettes outside the door as Harry brushed by and entered the bathroom. “Ain’t that the Chink waiting tables?” It was the voice of the gaunt, goofy-looking fellow.

Harry positioned himself in front of a urinal and unzipped his fly. “A room full of horny white guys and look who the foxy bitch sucks face with.” Again, it was the infantile winker running off at the mouth. He lowered his voice and, to Harry’s great relief, the running commentary became unintelligible. After a minute there was a raucous outburst of indecent hoots. Harry waited until the threesome had gone back to their seats before sneaking out the back door.

*****

In May Harry was accepted to Boston University. His senior prom was scheduled at the Biltmore in downtown Providence. The Paul Borelli big band would set up in the main ballroom. He didn’t have a date yet. Tuesday afternoon when Harry arrived at Shop Rite, another woman was working the middle register. “Mavis never showed,” the woman reported flatly. “No call. No nothing.”

An hour later, three policemen entered the store and requested, Molly Pruitt, the store manager. They spoke informally near the recycling bins; one officer penciled notes on a loose-leaf pad. Toward six o’clock fragments of second-hand information began to circulate. Mavis was at the hospital. A bad car accident. Head injuries. Broken teeth. The husband was dead.

Harry hurried to the manager’s office. “There’s been some talk - ”

The manager looked up. Her face was pale, expressionless. “Not now,” she said rather tersely and waved Harry out of the room.

Harry cornered Nellie Higgins at customer service and asked about the accident. Nellie looked even worse than Molly Pruitt. “There wasn’t any accident. Mavis’ husband came home drunk and beat the crap out of her. Busted up her face something awful, according to the cops. She’s still at the hospital. Be released home in a day or so, poor woman.”

Harry felt his brain convulse, crushed like an animal’s paw in a steel-trap. “The husband?”

“Cleaned out the joint bank account and flew the coop. Cops figure he headed south. Got relatives and friends down there.” Nellie leaned over the counter. “We’re taking up a collection... to get Mavis a nice fruit basket and a card.”

“Fruit basket,” Harry repeated hollowly and groped his way to the men’s room where he sat on a toilet with the door closed and lowered his head between his legs.


Some ugly bitch who can’t neither hear nor talk. A deaf mute.

Harry remembered Travis’ drawling commentary. How he laughed like a treacherous fool, a Judas Iscariot, with Mavis, no more than twenty feet away, drying the last of the dishes.

In the morning, Harry bunked school and headed over to the hospital. Mavis was sitting in the solarium with a hospital-issue robe thrown over her shoulders. Both eyes were smudged black, the sooty discoloration fanning to the delicate lashes, bleeding down the cheekbone like spilled ink. “Travis hits real hard.”

Harry gripped the back of a hardwood chair and held on like a drowning man. The two front teeth were gone, snapped off at the gum line, leaving a hole five-eighths of an inch across and half an inch deep. “Why did he do it?”

Mavis folded her hands demurely in her lap. “For the fun of it.”

“What’s wrong with your eye?”

She patted the side of her face gingerly. “He broke my cheekbone. The eye won’t focus.” Mavis opened her mouth and pointed. “My medical insurance has a deductible on dental... five hundred dollar. And I’m already in hock up to my ears.”

A nurse pushing a wheelchair ahead of her entered the solarium. “Need another X-ray of that cheek.”

Mavis transferred to the wheelchair and sat legs askew like a rag doll, slumped at an angle. “It was sweet of you to come.” The nurse pushed off, leaving Harry standing in an empty, sun-drenched room.


A week later, Harry heard, through word of mouth, that Mavis was back at Fox Run. Travis Calhoun had been sighted at a cabin his uncle owned in Murfreesboro on the west fork of the Stones River. But when the police arrived he was long gone, driven deep into the rural brush by enlightened self-interest.

Harry went to visit Mavis one night after work. “How’re you feeling?”

The raccoon mask had faded to a sickly yellow tinged with olive. “Much better. The double vision’s gone.”

Both eyes seemed to be cooperating quite nicely. “I had a similar problem with one of my eyes when I was a baby,” Harry said. “Any word on your husband?”

Mavis smiled. “Called from a truck stop in Georgia. Apologized half a million times for what he did. Cried like a baby.”

“Yes, that seems about right.”

Mavis went into the bedroom and returned with the blue-handled revolver. She tipped the muzzle forward and cracked the barrel to reveal a fat, 357 slug in each chamber. “I told him, if he ever showed his face around here, I’d blow his pecker and both testicles off with the defective Smith and Wesson.”

Harry ran a finger over her closed lips, inserting it gently into her mouth, navigating the crevice. “After your husband bashed your exquisite teeth in,” Harry said, “I asked myself what the immortal saints would do - Gandhi, Krishnamurti, Hermann Hesse, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Tolstoy... the whole, cosmic crew. All the enlightened masters and morally superior beings. I pictured them munching pork lo mein and chugalugging Budweisers till their spiritually-unencumbered brains were fried; listening to whiny hillbilly music and your husband’s sarcastic tirades.”

Harry laid an envelope on the kitchen table. He opened it and a collection of bills - twenties and fifties spilled across the surface of the table. “Five hundred bucks to cover the deductible on your dental insurance.” He nudged the bills toward her. “To get your mouth fixed.”
Mavis collapsed tiredly into the chair and stared at the scattering of money. “This isn’t right.”

“Trust me,” Harry shot back. “Where’re the broken teeth?”

On the counter next to the sugar jar, was a piece of Kleenex, bunched together and tied with a string. She brought the impromptu pouch to the table and carefully unwrapped the tissue. Harry flipped the teeth over several times until they lay front-side up. Identical in every respect, the pale enamel on one was obliterated by a wine-colored stain. “Which is which?”

Mavis shrugged. He took the blotchy tooth to the sink, rinsed the blood away and placed it alongside its mate. “Twin souls!”

After awhile, he rewrapped the teeth in fresh tissue and secured it with the string. “Bring this to the dentist on the first visit.”

“Yes, I’ll certainly do that,” Mavis said. “Would you like some coffee?” Harry shook his head. She put the kettle on to boil. While the water was heating, Harry moved into the living room. On the coffee table was a clothbound collection of spiritual verses. A page toward the rear was dog-eared and a short verse underlined:

Since we’ve seen each other, a game goes on.
Secretly I move, and you respond.
You’re winning, you think it’s funny...

In the kitchen the kettle sent up an insistent, wheezy drone. Mavis brought the warm drinks into the living room. As they talked, Harry hardly noticed the fading raccoon mask or the intermittent, sibilant hiss as her tongue stumbled and faltered through the breach.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 16.06.2011

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