#178: "The Reign of the Gypsies" by Randy Bates

~This nonfiction narrative originally appeared in The New Orleans Review (1980).

Editor’s note: This piece contains offensive language.

                                                                                                

The Reign of the Gypsies

My stepfather slept with pistols.  I have a memory from shortly after my mother married him and he moved the three of us into the blue house on the hill.  I am sitting cross-legged on their bed.  Marvin reaches into the drawer of the night table.  This is Joe, he says, hefting out a stubby .38.  He opens his coat.  And Old Tom.   A squarish .45 is strapped to a stiff piece of leather under his arm.  The point of the display was that I was never to touch these things, which I became accustomed to as furnishings of their room, Joe on the night table with the medicine bottles and mystery books and Old Tom under Marvin’s pillow.

            No one ever explained to me why Marvin armed himself.  I doubt anyone could have.  I came to understand on my own that he gambled and that his successful amusement company supplied local honkytonks with illegal slot machines as well as with nickelodeons and pinball.  Our east Mississippi town accepted him as a benign sort of rich outlaw.  Except for the benign part, he so encouraged this impression that I eventually decided his guns were props.  Now I know it wasn’t that simple.  No more simple than childhood, which I once thought was overrated as being a time of wonder.

Marvin feared gypsies.  I didn’t know that gypsies had a history in our town and that a gypsy queen is buried there, and I didn’t know if gypsies were even real or if they were like the fantasy people in some of my books.  Yet one afternoon after I came home from elementary school, he almost convinced me a gang of them had laid siege to the house.  I remember charging at windows with my baseball bat and a favorite kitchen knife.  Our excitable dogs roiled about me.  Marvin joined in from his window chair at the kitchen table and shouted encouragement and warnings as I kicked paths through the dogs.

            The game ended when he locked me indoors and took the boxers to guard outside.  Through the picture window in the playroom I watched him standing at the top of the driveway overlooking an acre of yard.  The boxers have run off.  Breeze ruffles his silk pajamas and thick, perfectly white hair.  He ignores a neighbor’s called greeting, cocks my BB gun, and sets himself to stare down a pine tree.

            There were many pines in that yard, and woods lay beyond.  He must have held the vigil until my mother came home from her work at his office.  By the time she coaxed him inside, I was either picking at the house dogs or peering through snow on the new television set.

#177: Three Poems by Paulette Beete

~This poem previously appeared in Callaloo (1999).

Improvisation #2: Charlie Parker Dies for Our Sins

exhale a blue dream and follow it up

hear heaven sing back to you

its majestic tone flatted a ¼ step as

it riffs your breath

don’t look down

Hail Mary and Praise Jesus will not save you though

a needle can prick the pain into

a single sixteenth under your skin

Thou shalt not wear brown skin boldly.

Thou shalt not cry in laughing notes.

Thou shalt not wallow in the bottom to reach the top.

these songs will be a burning bush in your mouth

the notes will buoy you up til you are

spoonfeeding each vibration

into God’s allergic ear.

God himself will remind you that

the wages of sin are death.

*****

Welcome to Kenneth A. Fleming, Assistant Editor!

We're pleased to introduce the new assistant editor of Redux, Kenneth Fleming, who has signed on to help review submissions and solicit previously published work from writers. 

Bio:
Kenneth A. Fleming is a fiction writer living in Silver Spring, Maryland. He holds a Master of Arts in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. He is currently finishing up a short story collection and working on a novel.

#176: "Close to San Miguel" by C.M. Mayo

~This story was originally published in Witness: Love in America and in Thema: The Road to the Villa (1999).

                                                

      Americans like San Miguel, so he would take her there. He'd already shown her many things she liked: the Diego Rivera murals in the Palacio Nacional, the floating gardens of Xochimilco, the house of Frida Kahlo. She liked the house of Frida Kahlo very much. She'd never seen a house painted that color before. It was cobalt, a little darker than the color of her computer screen.

But some things she did not like: the beggars at the stoplights, the filthy-faced Indian children pressing boxes of Chiclets against the car windows, the garbage that littered the streets. She was nervous about any ice in her drinks. He took her to the new shopping mall called Perisur, but she didn't recognize any of the stores. She couldn't find her size in any of the shoes.

 Her name was Greta. He liked to call her Greta Garbo because she was tall and she had honey-blonde hair and she had long thin hands and she plucked her eyebrows into the shape of boomerangs. He liked to think she was Swedish, especially when they had their clothes off. In fact she was Irish Catholic on both sides, from Seattle, Washington (where the apples were gigantic, almost square and waxy red). They'd met in Boston, at the end of their first semester in an MBA program; now it was summertime.

His name was Gerardo. He spoke English very well because his parents had sent him to Denver, Colorado for a year when he was in high school. He had stayed with a family that was very much like Greta's, he imagined. He'd liked them, despite their German Shepherd, a bitch that liked to pounce out from behind the La-Z-Boy and bite him on the behind. Not very hard, but it unnerved him.

#175: Three Poems by Diane Kirsten Martin

~This poem was previously published in Harvard Review (2011).

A Study in Chiaroscuro

Sometimes what feels good is the most dangerous.

Remember uncle sun staring down your décolletage.

Think the daintiest little bright mushrooms.

Whose fault is it if you won’t listen, if you

indulge too easily the heart’s clamor?

Inside a small screen, brown Bakelite exterior,

a cathode ray soul screams at each scuffle

closer to the goal line. Beyond, schoolmates

in penny loafers and knee socks shuffle down leafy

sidewalks, pressing loose leaf binders to the chest.

From the pellucid moment of this autumn morning,

you still can’t change the channel. You want to turn

blind eyes to that escapade. And to the airport angel

with her well-worn harp—could you afford to give

her absolution, say, an E-for-effort blessing?

If there were a God, do you think He would be

the red-shouldered hawk sheltering the fledgling,

or the fierce raptor seizing the gopher, greedy and slow,

clambering to its burrow? Shouldn’t the gopher be

warned by the shadow of the wings overhead?

*****

#174: "Tourist's Attraction" by Jessica Garratt

~This poem was originally published in Western Humanities Review (2012).

Tourist’s Attraction

“‘But what is it all about? People loose and at the same time caught. Caught and loose. All these people and you don’t know what joins them up.’”

                              –Frankie, from Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding

Living by myself in this house

which others have called home and then

not called home, each for their own

good reasons, reminds me to wonder

if what I have is a tourist’s

attraction to love. I’m reminded

how hard a tourist falls

when she feels herself set a little apart,

when she feels that old ache

in the eye, to see clear through

the signage that drew her

in the first place. To see through

is her mania – to see down

to the sacred bones of a sacred site

and through the bones

of the others who traveled there

(even those who traveled with her)

and clutter the air with their bright

t-shirts, their voices flashing

with a present tense

so annoyingly unshadowed

it won’t survive the glib back-glance

of Tuesday. Can you blame her

for wanting to dig down

to a bedrock Now? But I do. I

blame her. Looking through

has something of a look away

in its heart. An old desire of the young

to strip things down – dear

things, some – to an essence, bared like teeth

of the no longer living.

I’m thinking

of Machu Picchu there, if you want

to know.  The skulls, the sacrificed

virgins’ bones, the unmoved sacred stones…

It’s on my mind because this morning I stood

out on the porch of this house in Georgia

where I’m living temporarily, and where

Carson McCullers (now dead) once lived

as a child, less (but still) temporarily,

and I set up a card table – a pretty good copy

of the card table my grandmother put out in the den

for Gin Rummy with my sister and I

when we were kids – and I sat there

on the porch with the deck of cards

I bought earlier this summer in Peru

for Rummy with my sister

on trains and in the airport,

but today (and all week) I’ve played Solitaire

in Georgia’s late-summer, late-morning

heat, and on each card I slapped down,

a new dull snapshot shone

of Machu Picchu, blue sky

an ageless tapestry behind it. White spackle

of clouds. In a few, tourists

who must each, in that moment,

have felt the unyielding ground

supporting their feet, the reliable arch

of the view as it poured in like concrete

to meet the clarity of their eyes,

and not known another perspective

made them small, then guarded

by a two of spades, a jack of clubs, a diamond,

some hearts. It’s September now and still

nothing’s lined up, not once,

on the Solitaire front, so I go on

with the contented mania

of a slot machinist, more at home

with disequilibrium anyway.

#173: "The Boyfriend" by Sheri Joseph

~This story was originally published in The Kenyon Review (2003).

  

The Boyfriend

  

The cockatoo came in wheezing.  Its owner, a tall young woman with tired eyes, scooped the bird from a plastic cat carrier and placed it on the table before the vet.  “He doesn’t act right,” she said.  “Since yesterday.  Won’t eat or anything.”

              The vet, Dr. Wendy Howard, slim, freckled, and boyish, set her hands on her hips.  “Not feeling too good, huh?” she said to the bird, in the expressively sympathetic voice most people reserved for mopey children.   

            Cassandra, the technician, waited at Wendy’s left shoulder like a pink-smocked soldier at ease, ready in case she were needed.  Though trained in numerous technical tasks befitting her title, her primary job, as it turned out, was to restrain the animals for the vet’s examination.  This one, an umbrella cockatoo—a common variety the size of a small chicken—appeared too lethargic to need restraint.  Otherwise she would have stepped to the table without being beckoned and taken hold, one thumb notched into the crevice beneath the cockatoo’s nutcracker beak and the other hand pinning the wings, leaving the sternum untouched so as not to interfere with breathing.  In a year of handling exotics, she had learned to accomplish restraint so that Wendy almost never had to speak a word of instruction, whatever manner of bird, mammal, or reptile awaited her on the table.    

            She watched now as Wendy slid the towel from the bottom of the bird’s carrier and frowned at the droppings.  The owner yawned, pressing at the sockets of her eyes, where the skin was deeply tanned and printed with the remains of yesterday’s mascara.  She was maybe thirty, attractive, though she had the sordid, much-handled look of a child’s favorite Barbie.  Her ponytail, long and striped with peroxide, looked less like a hairstyle than a convenient handle for dragging her around.  Cassandra imagined she must have survived something, escaped and settled into a solitary life with this pet. 

            “His name’s Oscar,” the owner added, while Wendy set her fingertips along both sides of the bird’s jaw, as if to critically admire a beauty.  The bird shifted its gray feet on the table and settled back to torpor.  Its eyes, like the woman’s, opened only by half.