Serta has her sandwich fixins out. White bread. Slices of what she calls “Oscar meat.” She put the mayo on already and has a daub of mustard on a butter knife. Table wobbles under her elbows, upper arms wobbling, too.
“Goin’ huntin’,” I say, waving my left hand in front of my face because of the stink drainin’ like a polluted river down the stairs from the direction of Ma’s room.
“Huntin’ for unintended wisdom,” I say, not because Serta hasn’t heard it, but just to remind her that someone in this ramshackle abode has a work ethic.
I could say more. About hunting for the past, for a way home, for a path out of a house suffused with the stench of lassitude, fatigue and, if I could be honest, necrosis, upstairs, down the hall, behind the door where mother lives. Lived, as is my suspicion, but avoidance is our most polished skill, here in the house where two of us still breathe news of the third.
“You should take a sanny to Ma,” I say to Serta, and she turns and looks at me over the top of her store-bought readers, like she knows I know there would be no point to that. It’s a cash flow situation. If we ignore what we all know to be the reality of Ma’s demise, we sustain the flow of Social Security checks to her account.
The dream from the night before was still inflamed. As I had in life, I found myself working on the copy desk at the newspaper late one evening. I was alone. I wondered why. I got up and wandered down the hall, where I found other offices, people in them, shuffling papers, moving boxes, having meetings. Just not about the newspaper I was tasked with producing. When I asked where my colleagues were, I got blank stares. When I returned to the newsroom, it was still empty. How would I do this? How would I produce a paper without a team? After a bit, I got up and left the dream.
“Wanna sanny?” Serta asks.
“Nope,” I say. “It might cloud my receptacles. I’m not letting anything get in the way of me tracking down the inspiration, wisdom, huge truth and advice that lies inside the common man. And woman.”
Once a reporter, always a reporter. Wisdom was out there. I figured I could still seek it, find it, record it, share it. In print. Not some digital nonsense. Hard copy.
“Rent due,” Serta says.
She moves like the tide toward our table, her rumple of hair collapsed on either side of her head, like tacky add-ons to the main house, the whole shebang as wide as it is tall.
“Gonna evict us we don’t pay,” Serta says. “Know what mama say. Pay first. Sleep later.”
“I slept later. How is Mama? Did her check come?”
“She still sleepin’. Three weeks now. Today’s the day her check drops.”
“Well …,” I say, unsure if I should state the obvious. “She’s good for it. Long as she’s up there, the check will come. Regular as sunshine.”
“She sleepin’ good,” Serta says. “Ain’t heard a peep in awhile now.”
“I can’t sit around waiting for her to wake up. I’ve got work to do. It’s out there. Verbal evidence of human brilliance. I like to think of the wisdom that percolates from inside the common folk as mouth prints.”
“You nuts,” Serta says. “Mouth prints? What the fuck?”
She folds the bread together and eats about half the mess in one bite. She’s big. Getting bigger. Healthy gal, my sis. No way she’ll starve. I just need to sell some of my books. Before I have books to sell, I need something to put in them. I’ve explained this to Serta, but it’s clear she needs a repeat.
“Dear dear darlin’ Sis, this is what’s making me nuts. I’m after rounding up what people say. They always say something. Most of the time, it don’t mean a thing. But once in a rare moment, it’s amazing. They don’t know it, most of the time. They just say it. It’s why I’ve got to be there, to capture it. They don’t know their own genius. I got my ears tuned for catching their mouth prints. Like butterflies.”
I put my hands behind my ears and pull them forward into wisdom-catching position and push my face up next to hers, like punctuation on a thought.
“You should get a job,” she says.
“You’re not paying attention. What did I just told you? I’m working. Gathering raw material for my finished product.”
“Sell anything lately?”
She stuffs the last of her sandwich into her mouth.
“Research first,” I say. “What about you? You took home ec. You could get a job, makin’ those great sannies. Maybe lose a little weight first. You look like you ate.”
Serta chews and stares at me. “Only one losin’ weight around here is Ma. She shrinkin’. Looked in a couple days back, and she all dried up.”
“Like a salted haddock?”
“More like a mummy. Our mummy. In need of some emollients.”
I tell Serta there is nothing about the continued cashing of Ma’s Social Security checks that would prevent Serta from generating a little cash flow of her own.
“Think about it, Sis,” I say. “You got assets.”
She winked at me and swatted hers.
“Waitin for my mail man,” she says. “He come in for coffee yesterday.”
“Know what I say? Given a choice between bacon and sausage, take it.”
She’s chewing. Cheeks too full for chatter.
“Know what you need?” I suggest. “A digital guest book. Take a big ol’ selfie, you walkin’ around. Put it on Ya-hooToob. Let the mailmen comment on their time with you. Let everybody comment on their comments. It’s what they call digital. It would make a great read, for somebody, someday.”
“Serious?”
“Sure am. You could monetize it.”
“Monetize? The fuck’s that?”
“Let’m put ads up there, for all your fans. Anything’s possible, Sert, even for you. Miracles happen if you let’m. Hell, I bet those mail persons would love to scroll through all those comments. Learn a few things. Help them focus on their future.”
I grab my notepad.
“Maybe you could open the windows?” I say to Serta. “Air this place out? It’s smellin’ kinda gamey lately. Bad bologna.”
“Busy,” she says, starting work on another sangwich.
I step into the next room and the next after that, lifting sashes before I exit the premises. I had avoided looking in on Ma, for awhile now, since we stopped hearing from her and the flies convened outside her door.
What we were doin’? Ill eagle. I knew it. Hell, I was a reporter. We wrote about this shit. Fraud, they call it, but only if they know it. They being whoever likely collects taxpayers dollars to bring the hammer of justice down. The way Serta and I winked about it, Ma earned that money, and we were her heirs, so why close the account before we cashed out?
As I stroll down the sidewalk, fanning myself with my notebook, a tiny cloud of despond forms over my head. Much as I want to believe that the world eagerly desires collective wisdom, all evidence suggests otherwise. One of the things that was beginning to dawn on me in my pursuit of aggregating common enlightenment was that no matter how much of it is out there – believe me, there’s as much of it as there isn’t – most people on the consumer side of the equation don’t want to pay for wisdom. Especially when it comes from someone else. Most people think they know it all. Already. Or they’re just fine not knowing it. Ask them. They’re wise beyond belief, they’ll be glad to tell you. They don’t need anybody telling them how to be wiser or live better. They’ll make their own damned mistakes, if you please.
Still, I have to try. Even if just a fraction of humanity opts to tap my abstract, I’ll be rich. Enough to pay the rent, if word ever gets out that Mama has passed her pull date, which is what I think is going on with her extended bedroom stay, but I’m hoping Serta can confirm. That news is one bad sangwich.
I always like visiting the antique mall. A repository of enduring creativity and goodness. Yesterday and Today, is what they call ours. One foot in the past. One foot here. Selling old to the new.
I stop at Loretta’s stall, mostly cut glass. She’s watching basketball, waiting for customers. I’m not one and she knows it.
“Who’s winning?”
“Depends on when you look,” she says. “It only takes one point to win. Or lose. And one point less to be really damn close.”
I wait until I’m out of sight to write it down. I turn the corner and there’s Eddie. His inventory is musty paperback mysteries from the mid-20th century. Mickey Spillane and cleavage.
“How’s biz?”
He looks at me over the top of his readers, perched wobbly on the bridge of a fender bender nose.
“You’re like the timeless architecture of the antique mall industry,” I say.
He continues to look at me over his readers.
“Literature built like mid-century modern houses?” I say, in clarification. “Classic lines? Inviting? Affordable? And ready for another spin around the block?”
“You’re full of it, you know?” he says. “I sell pulp. Guns ‘n’ tits. Tits ‘n’ guns.”
“Like I said.”
I jot a few notes.
“I’m thinking of getting into litigation,” I say, not entirely out of the realm. I realize that I’m not exactly killing it, using this research ruse to kill time between meals with Serta.
“You’ve got to be a lawyer,” he says.
“Not if you’re seriously injured in an antique mall.”
He returns to whatever he was doing before I became a distraction. A crossword, if I’m not mistaken. Ask me later and I’ll tell you what that is. I wait, because I know there’s more.
“Yeah, but those pulps are selling,” he says, taking us back to my first question. “Got a new Prather in. Nobody writes this guns-n-knuckles shit anymore, but people want it. Fiction doesn’t lend itself to remodeling.”
I move on, wander the mall, not sure what I’m looking for, not sure I’d recognize it if I found it. Nothing excites me any more. The women – it’s mostly women in the mall – all pull back and start rustling around their feet when I approach, and show no signs of coming up for air until I pass. All except Jif. Her parents named her Luella, but everybody calls her Jif since she developed a taste for transferring peanut butter from a jar directly to her tongue on the blade of a table knife. Mainly because it won’t flow through a drip line. She’s showing the benefits of hydrogenated vegetable oil. She has a big rebel flag hanging from the back of her booth.
“How’s the South doin’ today?” I ask.
“Gonna rise, soon, if the got-damn gubmint don’ quit all this foolishness.”
It is hard to parse her response, so I play complicit.
“The South may be south, but it’s still north of somewhere else,” I say.
She looks at me as if she would kill me for a good reason, lord knows what that might be.
“You know,” I say, “adult birds caution their kids to watch out for strangers when they send them off to school.”
“Believe it,” she says. “Snakes and demons everywhere.”
I flip my notebook to a clean page, click my pen, put tip to paper.
“What you writin’?”
“Pearls.”
“Pearls?”
“Of wisdom.”
“Don’t quote me.”
“Don’t worry. If I did, I’d have to share my royalties.”
“You? Royalty? Ha! That’s a good one.”
I leave the mall. It’s about time for lunch. I can’t decide between a sandwich and a hamburger so I step into Guy’s and order a hot beef sandwich.
“Brown today?” Guy says.
“Yep. White yesterday.”
I do prefer the hot turkey, but I like to mix it up.
“Hey, is that true?” I ask and point to the banner on the wall above the pass from the kitchen. Guy looks up. “What? Fighting Pirates?”
“Aren’t they always?”
“Pirates?”
“Fighting. You never see any team called the Equivocating Pirates. Or the Layabout Good-for-Nothing Pirates. It’s always Fighting. Then they lose 42-0 and go to the woods and drink too much and get their girlfriends pregnant and that’s how we find ourselves here.”
“And if they really were Fighting Pirates, things would be different?”
I think about this for a second. Sip my coffee. Shake my head. Write some chicken-scratch in my research notebook. My hot beef arrives. I eat the mashers first.
Walking toward home with dubious wisdom for my efforts, I think briefly of those times when I had rushed to a big fire or found-body incident, back to the newsroom with my notebook stuffed. The adrenalin rush toward completion and implied connection, readers opening their paper, seeing my name, sliding into story. A kind of baton pass in the daily relay of composing community. My life has become a three-alarm fire. Loss turned to lost. Who would take note?
I slip in behind a familiar shape, going down the sidewalk. It’s Jif and Sullivan Otto, Serta’s postman.
I see Jif and the postman slow down. And stop. He opens a door between the package shipping store and the second- and third-hand clothing place where matronly types shop. They go in and the door clicks. I stand there, staring through the glass door after them as they slowly climb some stairs and disappear into a hallway on the second level.
I can only guess what’s up there. It’s likely not a thing you can buy or sell or consume and regret, more likely a time of leaving everything else behind and discovering things about another person and yourself all at the same time. Sweat would be the loudest language and they would be complicated and enthusiastic, full of stops and starts. All sorts of activity I can only imagine.
A part of me thinks I should cue Serta in on the mailman’s treasonous door-to-door services. Another part tells me to spike that story. Serta would be crushed if she knew. Best to let her keep making coffee for the man. Every address gets its own mail, so it would be crazy to want or expect it all.
It’s not like everybody gets the same things, or all of the things they want. Better to let her keep that small share than nothing at all.
Besides, at some point, old Sullivan might change routes, and leave no forwarding address.
The house is empty when I get home. I make coffee, sit at the kitchen table. Air smells fresh. Fresher than in awhile.
I hear Serta on the back porch. Muffled voices. She steps into the kitchen, Sullivan Otto close behind her. My mind spins. Hey, didn’t I just see … Jif … and him … downtown?
“What’re you two young’uns up to?” I ask, sipping coffee.
“I had a package to drop off. Mama asked me to send it. Somethin’ for her sister. Sullie lives upstairs. So I went up to say ‘Hi.’ He introduced me to a friend. Has a booth at that junk mall. Real nice.”
“We played us some … poker,” Sullie says, and tilts his eyes at Serta. It was a lot. Serta and I would talk. Something told me our desiccated Mama was taking a trip, inside a cardboard box, to visit a woman who had herself been dead for almost twenty years. And Serta? The thought of her and Sullivan Otto and Jif … playing poker? Well, that triangulated image of ribald cavortage would require further contemplation. Maybe with one of Serta’s fine sangwiches. Or a bottle of single malt.
***
Stuart Watson worked at newspapers in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland, and has literary work in Bull, Barzakh, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Bending Genres (Best Microfictions nominee), The Writing Disorder, Rattle, The Muleskinner Journal, Reckon Review, Sensitive Skin, The Broadkill Review, Stanchion, Does It Have Pockets? and others, all linked from chiselchips.com. He lives in Oregon.