Red Clocks Read online

  Waiting on the hard little plastic chair, under elevator music and fluorescent glare, the biographer takes out her notebook. Everything in this notebook must be in list form, and any list is eligible. Items for next food shop. Kalbfleisch’s necktie designs. Countries with most lighthouses per capita.

  She starts a new one: Accusations from the world.

  1. You’re too old.

  2. If you can’t have a child the natural way, you shouldn’t have one at all.

  3. Every child needs two parents.

  4. Children raised by single mothers are more liable to rape/murder/drug-take/score low on standardized tests.

  5. You’re too old.

  6. You should’ve thought of this earlier.

  7. You’re selfish.

  8. You’re doing something unnatural.

  9. How is that child going to feel when she finds out her father is an anonymous masturbator?

  10. Your body is a grizzled husk.

  11. You’re too old, sad spinster!

  12. Are you only doing this because you’re lonely?

  “Miss? Prescription’s ready.”

  “Thank you.” She signs the screen on the counter. “How’s your day been?”

  Lashes turns up his palms at the ceiling.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” says the biographer, “this medication is going to make me have a foul-smelling vaginal discharge.”

  “At least it’s for a good cause.”

  She clears her throat.

  “That’ll be one hundred fifty-seven dollars and sixty-three cents,” he adds.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “A hundred and fifty-seven dollars? For ten pills?”

  “Your insurance doesn’t cover it.”

  “Why the eff not?”

  Lashes shakes his head. “I wish I could, like, slip it to you, but they’ve got cameras on every inch of this bitch.”

  The polar explorer Eivør Mínervudottír spent many hours, as a child, in the sea-washed lighthouse whose keeper was her uncle.

  She knew not to talk while he was making entries in the record book.

  Never to strike a match unsupervised.

  Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.

  To keep her head low in the lantern room.

  To pee in the pot and leave it, and if she did caca, to wrap it in fish paper for the garbage box.

  THE MENDER

  From the halt hen two eggs come down, one cracked, one sound. “Thank you,” the mender tells the hen, a Dark Brahma with a red wattle and brindled feathers. Because she limps badly—is not one of the winners—this hen is the mender’s favorite. A daily happiness to feed her, save her from foxes and rain.

  Sound egg in her pocket, she pours the goats’ grain. Hans and Pinka are out rambling but will be home soon. They know she can’t protect them if they ramble too far. Three shingles have come off the goat-shed roof; she needs nails. Under the shed there used to sleep a varying hare. Brown in summer, white in winter. He hated carrots and loved apples, whose seeds, poisonous to rabbits, the mender made sure to remove. The hare was so cuddly she didn’t care that he stole alfalfa from the goats or strewed poo pellets on her bed when she let him inside. One morning she found his body ripped open, a sack of furry blood. Rage poured up her throat at the fox or coyote, the bobcat, you took him, but they were only feeding themselves, you shouldn’t have took him, prey is scarce in winter, but he was mine. She cried while digging. Laid the hare beside her aunt’s old cat, two small graves under the madrone.

  In the cabin the mender stirs the egg with vinegar and shepherd’s purse for the client who’s coming later, an over-bleeder. The drink will staunch her clotty, aching flow. She’s got no job and no insurance. I can pay you with batteries, her note said. Vinegary egg screwed tight in a glass jar and tucked into the mini fridge, beside a foil-wrapped wedge of cheddar. The mender wants the cheese right now, this minute, but cheese is only for Fridays. Black licorice nibs are for Sundays.

  She mostly eats from the forest. Watercress and bitter cress, dandelion, plantain. Glasswort and chickweed. Bear grass, delicious when grilled. Burdock root to mash and fry. Miner’s lettuce and stinging nettle and, in small quantities, ghost pipe. (She loves the white stalks boiled with lemon and salt, but too much ghost pipe can kill you.) And she gleans from orchards and fields: hazelnuts, apples, cranberries, pears. If she could live off the land alone, without person-made things, she would. She hasn’t figured out how yet, but that doesn’t mean she won’t. Show them how Percivals do.

  Her mother was a Percival. Her aunt was a Percival. The mender has been a Percival since age six, when her mother left her father. Which was because her father went away most Friday afternoons and didn’t come back until Monday and never said why. “A woman wants to know why,” said the mender’s mother. “At least give me that, fuckermo. Names and places! Ages and occupations!” They drove west across Oregon’s high desert, over the Cascade Mountains, mother smoking and daughter spitting out the window, to the coast, where the mender’s aunt ran a shop that sold candles, runes, and tarot packs. On the first night, the mender asked what that noise was and learned it was the ocean. “But when does it stop?” “Never,” said her aunt. “It’s perpetual, though impermanent.” And the mender’s mother said, “Pretentious much?”

  The mender would take pretentious any day over high.

  She lies naked with the cat by the stove’s heat, hard steady rain on the roof and the woods black and the foxes quiet, owlets asleep in their nest box. Malky leaps from her lap, paws at the door. “You want to get soaked, little fuckermo?” Gold-splashed eyes watch her solemnly. Gray flanks tremble. “You have a girlfriend you need to meet?” She shakes off the blanket and opens the door, and he flashes out.

  Whenever Lola came over, Malky hid; she thought the mender lived in the cabin alone. “Don’t you get frightened,” said Lola, “all the way up here in the middle of nothing?”

  Silly bitch, trees are not nothing. Nor are cats, goats, chickens, owls, foxes, bobcats, black-tailed deer, long-eared bats, red-tailed hawks, dark-eyed juncos, bald-faced hornets, varying hares, mourning cloak butterflies, black vine weevils, and souls fled from their mortal casings.

  Alone human-wise.

  She hasn’t heard from Lola since that day of the shouting. No notes left in her mailbox at the P.O., no visits. It was more than shouting. A fight. Lola, in her adorable green dress, was fighting. The mender was not. The mender barely said a word.

  Past noon, but the goats aren’t home yet. Cramp of worry. Last year they wrecked a campsite near the trail. Not their fault: some dumb tourist left food all over the woods. When the mender found them, the guy was pointing a rifle at Hans. “You better keep them on your property from here on out,” he said, “because I love goat stew.”

  In Europe they once held trials for misbehaving animals. Wasn’t just the witches they hanged. A pig was sent to the gallows for eating a child’s face, a mule roasted alive for having been penetrated by its human master. For the unnatural act of laying an egg, a rooster was burned at the stake. Bees found guilty of stinging a man to death were suffocated in the hive, their honey destroyed, lest murder honey infect the mouths that ate it.

  She with murder honey on her teeth shall bleed salt from where two curves of thigh skin meet. Tasting honey from the body of a bee with devil-face shall start this salty blood. Faces of bees who have done murder do resemble those of starving dogs, whose eyes grow more human looking as they starve. Apis mellifera, Apis diabolus. If a town be swarmed by bees with devil-face, and those bees do drip honey into open mouths, the body of a woman with honey tooth, bleeding thigh salt, shall be lashed to whatever stake will hold her. The bee swarm shall be gathered in a barrel and dumped upon the fire that eats her. The honey teeth do catch flame first, sparks of blue at the white before the red tongue catches too, and the lips. Bees’ bodies when burning do smell of hot marrow; the odor makes onlookers v
omit, yet still they look on.

  You needed a boat to reach the lighthouse, a quarter mile from shore, and if a storm hit, you slept overnight in a reindeer bag on the watch room’s slanted floor.

  During storms the polar explorer stood on the lantern gallery, holding its rail as if her life depended on it, because her life did. She loved any circumstance in which survival was not assured. The threat of being swept over the rail woke her from the lethargy sluggery she felt at home chopping rhubarb, cracking puffin eggs, peeling the skin off dead sheep.

  THE DAUGHTER

  Grew up in a city born of the terror of the vastness of space, where the streets lie tight in a grid. The men who built Salem, Oregon, were white Methodist missionaries who followed white fur-trade trappers to the Pacific Northwest, and the missionaries were less excited than the trappers by the wildness foaming in every direction. They laid their town in a valley that had been fished, harvested, and winter-camped for centuries by the Kalapuya people, who, in the 1850s, were forced onto reservations by the U.S. government. In the stolen valley the whites huddled and crouched, made everything smaller. Downtown Salem is a box of streets Britishly named: Church and Cottage and Market, Summer and Winter and East.

  The daughter knew every tidy inch of her city neighborhood. She is still learning the inches in Newville, where humans are less, nature is more.

  She stands in the lantern room of the Gunakadeit Lighthouse, north of town, where she has come after school with the person she hopes to officially call her boyfriend. From here you can see massive cliffs soaring up from the ocean, rust veined, green mossed; giant pines gathering like soldiers along their rim; goblin trees jutting slant from the rock face. You can see silver-white lather smashing at the cliffs’ ankles. The harbor and its moored boats and the ocean beyond, a shirred blue prairie stretching to the horizon, cut by bars of green. Far from shore: a black fin.

  “Boring up here,” says Ephraim.

  Look at the black fin! she wants to say. The goblin trees!

  She says, “Yeah,” and touches his jaw, specked with new beard. They kiss for a while. She loves it except for the tongue thrusts.

  Does the fin belong to a shark? Could it belong to a whale?

  She draws back from Ephraim to look at the sea.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Gone.

  “Wanna bounce?” he says.

  They race down the spiral staircase, boot soles ringing on the stone, and climb into the backseat of his car.

  “I think I saw a gray whale. Did you—?”

  “Nope,” says Ephraim. “But did you know blue whales have the biggest cocks of any animal? Eight to ten feet.”

  “The dinosaurs’ were bigger than that.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No, my dad’s got this book—” She stops: Ephraim has no father. The daughter’s father, though annoying, loves her more than all the world’s gold. “Anyway,” she says, “here’s one: A skeleton asks another skeleton, ‘Do you want to hear a joke?’ Second skeleton says, ‘Only if it’s humerus.’”

  “Why is that funny?”

  “Because—‘humerus’? The arm bone?”

  “That’s a little-kid joke.”

  Her mom’s favorite pun. It’s not her fault he didn’t know what a humerus was.

  “No more talking.” He goes to kiss her but she dodges, bites his shoulder through the cotton long sleeve, trying to break the skin but also not to. He gets her underpants down so fast it feels professional. Her jeans are already flung to some corner of the car, maybe on the steering wheel, maybe under the front seat, his jeans too, his hat.

  She reaches for his penis and circles her palm around the head, like she’s polishing.

  “Not like that—” Ephraim moves her hand to grip the shaft. Up down up down up down. “Like that.”

  He spits on his hand and wets his penis, guides it into her vagina. He shoves back and forth. It feels okay but not great, definitely not as great as they say it should feel, and it doesn’t help that the back of her head keeps slamming against the door handle, but the daughter has also read that it takes some time to get good at sex and to like it, especially for the girl. He has an orgasm with the same jittery moan she found weird at first but is getting used to, and she is relieved that her head has stopped being slammed against the door handle, so she smiles; and Ephraim smiles too; and she flinches at the sticky milk dribbling out of her.

  The explorer went to the lighthouse whenever allowed, at first, and once she could handle the boat alone, even when forbidden. Her uncle Bjartur felt bad that her father was dead and so let her come, although she bothered him with her questions; he was a lighthouse keeper, God knows, because he preferred his own company, but this little one, this Eivør, youngest of his favorite sister, he could find it in his chewed heart to let her run up the spiral stairs and dig through his trunk of ships’ debris and on drenched tiptoes watch the weather.

  THE WIFE

  Between town and home is a long twist of road that hugs the cliffside, climbing and dipping and climbing again.

  At the sharpest bend, whose guardrail is measly, the wife’s jaw tenses.

  What if she took her hands off the wheel and let them go?

  The car would jump along the top branches of the shore pines, tearing a fine green wake; flip once before building speed; fly past the rocks and into the water and down forever and—

  After the bend, she unclenches.

  Almost home.

  Second time this week she has pictured it.

  Soon as the groceries are in, she’ll give herself a few minutes upstairs. It won’t kill them to watch a screen.

  Why did she buy the grass-fed beef? Six dollars more per pound.

  Second time this week.

  They say grass-fed has the best fats.

  Which might be entirely common. Maybe everyone pictures it, maybe not as often as twice a week but—

  A little animal is struggling across the road. Dark, about a foot long.

  Possum? Porcupine? Trying to cross.

  Maybe it’s even healthy to picture it.

  Closer: burnt black, scorched to rubber.

  Shivering.

  Already dead, still trying.

  What burned it? Or who?

  “You’re making us crash!”—from the backseat.

  “We’re not crashing,” says the wife. Her foot is capable and steadfast. They will never crash with her foot on the brake.

  Who burned this animal?

  Convulsing, trembling, already so dead. Fur singed off. Skin black rubber.

  Who burned you?

  Closer: it’s a black plastic bag.

  But she can’t unsee the shivering thing, burnt and dead and trying.

  At the house: unbuckle, untangle, lift, carry, set down.

  Unpack, put away.

  Peel string cheese.

  Distribute string cheese.

  Place Bex and John in front of approved cartoon.

  Upstairs, the wife closes the sewing-room door. Sits cross-legged on the bed. Fixes her stare on the scuffed white wall.

  They are yipping and pipping, her two. They are rolling and polling and slapping and papping, rompling with little fists and heels on the bald carpet.

  They are hers, but she can’t get inside them.

  They can’t get back inside her.

  They are hurling their fists—Bex fistier, but John brave.

  Why did they name him John? Not a family name and almost as dull as the wife’s own. Bex had said, “I’m going to call the baby Yarnjee.”

  Is John brave, or foolish?—he squirms willingly while his sister punches. The wife doesn’t say No hitting because she doesn’t want them to stop, she wants them to get tired.

  She remembers why John: because everyone can spell and say it. John because his father hates correcting butchered English pronunciations of his own name. The errors of clerks. John is sometimes Jean-voyage; and Ro calls him Pliny the Y
ounger.

  In the past hour, the kids have

  Rolled and polled.

  Eaten leftover popcorn stirred into lemon yogurt.

  Asked the wife if they could watch more TV.

  Been told no.

  Slooped and chooped.

  Tipped over the standing lamp.

  Broken an eyelash.

  Asked the wife why her anus is out in space when it should be in her butt.

  Slapped and papped.

  Asked the wife what’s for dinner.

  Been told spaghetti.

  Asked the wife what does she think is the best kind of sauce for butt pasta.

  The grass-fed beef grows blood in a plastic bag. Does contact with the plastic cancel out its grass-fedness? She shouldn’t waste expensive meat in spaghetti sauce. Marinate it tonight? There’s a jar of store sauce in the—

  “Take your finger out of his nose.”

  “But he likes it,” says Bex.

  And broccoli. Those par-baked dinner rolls are delicious, but she isn’t going to serve bread with pasta.

  Sea-salt-almond chocolate bar stowed in the kitchen drawer, under the maps, please still be there, please still be there.

  “Do you like having your sister’s finger stuck up your nose?”

  John smiles, ducks, and nods.

  “When the fuck is dinner?”

  “What?”

  Bex knows her crime; she eyes the wife with a cunning frown. “I mean when the gosh.”

  “You said something else. Do you even know what it means?”