as Russell was withdrawing his unworthy feet from the scrutiny of his perfect-toed friend, Carmela came out on the porch. Seeing Manny sitting with his toes splayed, she made an assumption and asked, “Is he getting off on his toes again?”
She sat between the two men, patted her husband on the knee and said in an overly patronizing tone, “We all know your toes are perfect, dear.”
They swung together silently, until Russell spoke up.
“Hey, what’s with the house numbers on this street?”
“Oh,” Manny began with a low growl. “I don’t know, but if I ever get my hands on the person responsible I’m gonna slap some sense into him. I talked to the postman, or postwoman, I guess, and she said she didn’t know how it got to be so screwed up, but it’s been screwed up so long that no one’s going to do anything about it at this point. So I’m thinking I’ll just change our address randomly. Right now it’s 21. Tomorrow I’ll change it to 32. Next Thursday it’ll be 1508. Why not? It obviously doesn’t matter.”
Carmela got up and went inside again. They sat and drank their beer.
“Say, Russ,” Manny turned to him. “Did you turn off the lights in the sewing room?”
Russell nodded that he had.
“OK. Just leave them alone next time. They’re special fixtures with a ballast that should be turned on and off only once a day. Carmela knows that, and she takes care of it herself.”
With this point understood, Manny moved to another topic of interest. “Hey, did she show you The Wiggler?”
“The what?” came Russell’s reply.
“The Wiggler. It’s in our basement, left over from whoever owned the place before. It’s this antique exercise device. It’s got this kind of platform you stand on, and there’s this big rubber belt you put around your waist, and when you fire it up the belt starts moving and jerks your body around like a spaz. It’s supposed to, like, vibrate your fat off or something. It’s major machinery—I can see why they left it behind for someone else to deal with. Want to try it out?”
Russell shrugged and consented. As they were getting up, Carmela came back out and said, “What now?”
“I was going to introduce Russ to The Wiggler.”
“No,” she insisted. “God, no. Don’t go down in that basement and get that thing going. It shakes the whole house. Sheesh—just give it a rest.”
They all settled back. The sky was purple, the air was heavy.
“Hey,” Russell began, “Nestor totally freaked me out tonight with something out in the gazebo. You know what we were talking about this morning, the roller-rink organist? Well, it turns out Nestor’s been writing a piece of music about him, calling it The Phantom of the Roller Rink.”
She looked at him with a slightly skewed smile. “He’s putting you on, Russ. I talked to him this afternoon, told him you were in town. He asked what you were up to, and I got to talking about what we talked about, and told him you’d mentioned the skating rink. He’s goofing on you, pulling one of his jokes.”
Russell rocked tranquilly, then said, “So, what should I make of the story he told me about the flowers turning into worms?”
With his friends staring at him, he related the story as he’d heard it.
“That’s a new one on me,” she said. “But I don’t doubt it. I know for a fact that my Aunt Rosa has heard the voices of dead people on her radio.”
The night quietly absorbed this statement.
Russell looked around for a minute, assessing his surroundings. “Your house is just great, guys, just great. And right over there is old Nellie Widow’s.”
“You know, I told you all her property went to the city, and now it’s getting annexed to Fox Lake Park,” Carmela said, gesturing into the darkness. “So there’ll be one big park from the lake all the way up the ridge and out past here. Permanent green belt. Perfect for kids.”
Manny stretched and yawned. “I’m getting tired.”
“Oh, hey,” Russell hastened to ask, “have you seen Carl or Ellie recently?”
Carmela, now also yawning, said, “I haven’t talked to Ellie for a couple of weeks. But they’re still living out at Stillwater. Carl’s working some job in the city, sales rep or something.”
“Yeah, remember last time they were out here?” Manny asked his wife. “Remember Carl freaking out about that rock pile out there by the road? He was about to go out there and tear it apart. I don’t know what his problem was.”
Carmela’s cat came puttering across the porch and laid itself down at her feet. From where Russell sat he could clearly see the animal was pregnant.
“She’s pregnant,” he stated.
“Yep,” she said softly while stroking her pet.
“Oh,” he said, looking at Manny, who averted his eyes. “I just didn’t know, that’s all.”
A breeze came off the lake, rustling the windsock a bit. Carmela patted her cat’s head, then got up and gave Russell a quick kiss on the cheek.
“Good night, Russ.”
The two men sat awhile, staring out at the black water.
“Seen Guy Bogel or Gary Pierce around?” Russell ventured to ask.
Manny face expressed disdain. “No, and I don’t want to. Last time I saw those guys was when they came around here with a couple of AK-47s they were trying to get me to buy. What the hell do I want with one assault rifle, let alone two? Who knows where they got them, but I don’t like that business. Those guys are bad news.”
Russell accepted this and finished his beer. Manny got up and cracked his knuckles.
“I’m hitting the hay, Russ. You got the back room there, and anything you want. Just slam the door hard when you come in, so it locks. Don’t worry about slamming it—I’ll worry if I don’t hear it slam. OK?”
They hugged. Manny smiled, squeezed his shoulder, and said, “See you tomorrow.”
In the back room, as he was preparing to turn in, he remembered the envelope Nestor had given him. He opened it and read:
The graceful curve of subatomic particles, unresolved musical sentences, subtle intonations eliciting resonant memories of the warning: Do not eat shellfish when the glow of the dinoflagellates can be seen from shore. She sat at the picnic table and looked out across the pond. Scum bobbed on the waves, and she tried to remember her name. At a loss, she drank her soda and turned to the conversation at table. Forty people were talking at once. She could grasp words, but they had no context. She thought two cousins may have been discussing whether an individual’s name was Paco or Pablo. More voices joined in. Above the noise she heard the voice of Aunt Flora, who said, “Once I roped a wild horse and named him Paco.” Aunt Flora’s voice faded again into the confusion. An Eskimo Pie melted on a paper plate. Her amorphous mind continued
