Zebra Skin Shirt Read online

  The man did not laugh at my comment. He sighed and stared blankly ahead. I’m happy to report that my new parents were shocked. They hid me under the seat.

  The driver made an unscheduled stop and allowed the man to disembark. Seven stops later, Mom and Dad Slotterfield and I arrived downtown and I ate my ice cream. I ordered strawberry. I’d never been a fan of that particular flavor, but even as a six-year-old I felt vanilla, my favorite, would paint me as a racist. Chocolate, my second favorite, would have seemed like kowtowing.

  Approximately one score and seven years after the racial slur incident, I was a grown-up, waiting at a bus stop on Twelfth Street, just a few blocks south of downtown. The bus pulled up. The door swung open. A woman exited.

  It’s considered gauche to approach a bus before all the passengers have exited. I once saw a business man scream bloody murder and claw at the eyes of a homeless man for failing to respect this rule. A situation, I must add, that would have been mitigated by the presence of a professionally trained, sanctioned Public De-escalation Official. If such things existed, I would apply for that job.

  In this particular instance, I was the guilty party. Let it be known that I sometimes lose track of my fellow humans. I assume this happens to everyone. In this particular instance, I had been considering the one-legged seagull I’d espied from my apartment window earlier that morning. Seagulls are not entirely unheard of in Denver. I assume they pass thru on their annual migration and some of them choose to stay, presumably for the convenient skiing.

  This bird was pecking around in the middle of the street in front of my building. I had previously been fooled by birds into thinking they only had one leg. Flamingos, of course, but also robins and sparrows and various raptors. But just when I think I’m looking at a one-legged bird, the other leg folds down and I say, “Ah!”

  This seagull was verifiably one-legged. It had outstanding balance on its good leg. The other leg was a stump, which he wiggled around incessantly, as if to say, “I only have one leg!” He was picking at something, presumably a bread crust left by one of the children whom I’d seen earlier that day lingering outside the Waldorf school across the street.

  I cheered silently for this one-legged, geographically-misplaced bird. Give me the choice and I’d gladly lose a leg to grow some wings.

  Here, a crow swung out of the sky in a pendulous, descending arc, cackling and just missing the one-legged bird, who avoided the collision by taking a graceful hop several inches to the left. Another crow appeared and stole the bread crust. The victimized gull took flight, beating its wings until it alighted on the peak of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church adjacent to the Waldorf school.

  Say what you will about corvids, they do work well together.

  Hours later, I was seeking and failing to find any meaningful symbolism in this image as I attempted to board the Number Ten bus on Twelfth and Pennsylvania. It was in this state that I neglected to allow an exiting woman to descend the steps before I began my ascent. We collided.

  It was raining at the time—I should have mentioned this earlier—and I was carrying an umbrella. Sensing that she was about to berate me for my breech of bus etiquette, I handed my umbrella to the woman, for she had none. Another fact I’ve failed to mention: she was of above-average beauty. Arching eyebrows, shapely knees, the whole twenty-seven feet. I’m not immune to the aesthetic pleasures.

  When I placed my umbrella in her hand, the woman’s face metaphorically metamorphosized from a caterpillar to a butterfly. She called me a gentleman. I nodded deftly. We went our ways.

  Two weeks later, I was sprinting toward that very same bus stop, trying to catch the Number Ten. I did not sprint fast enough; I was still half a block away when the bus pulled up, expelled a passenger, and drove off. The expelled passenger strolled away from the stop, directly toward me. Due to my career in athletics, I was in good shape and was therefore not breathing heavily, but I was unhappy with the fact that the bus was running on time.

  The woman’s wide-mouthed smile fitted the day but not my mood. I did not recognize her immediately, as she was wearing slacks rather than the knee-length skirt of days gone by. She shouted a robust “Hey-o!”

  Neither of us was carrying an umbrella at the time. Nor was it raining.

  After reminding me that she was the soul to whom I’d loaned my umbrella, the woman insisted that she return it to me at my earliest convenience. I divulged my phone number and, six months later, after a courtship of sorts, we were eating in a diner in Holliday, Colorado when time came to a complete stop.

  I’m the only moving thing in the universe. To the best of my knowledge, that is. The universe is a vast, unknowable thing, as surely my circumstance will illustrate.

  Foreshadow-wise, that’s all you get. Details will follow once I’ve adequately set the scene. The tale is mine and I’ll pace it as I see fit.

  2

  Last week, my gal—first name Veronica, last name Vasquez—and I took a road trip to St. Louis, the city of her youth. Veronica’s aunt had died and we drove my car to the Show Me City to acknowledge the passing. As we crossed the state line into Missouri, Veronica declaimed that St. Louis was the home of vast, unseeable cracks from whence all the world’s madness emerged. After traversing the city multiple times, from hotel to church to cemetery to Veronica’s dead aunt’s favorite diner for an affordable brunch, I can confirm only that if said cracks do exist, they are indeed unseeable.

  Yesterday, after the shovels had patted the earth, and after we’d hugged all the appropriate parties, Veronica and I began our perilous trek back to Denver. Veronica, being an adventurous cuss, insisted on taking the road less cobbled and so we forewent the quicksilver glories of Interstate 70 for the earthy delights of crumbling two-lane highways. From St. Louis, take Highway 61 north to Hannibal, then turn west onto Route 36 for a drunken crow’s flight all the way to Denver, more or less.

  I can confirm that, although these roads are slower and more likely to bring one’s front bumper into close proximity to the slow-moving-vehicle sign dangling off the end of a manure spreader, the adjacent landscapes are far more cheery than are those of the Interstate, with its towering truck stop signs, homicidally-attired hitchhikers for whom one does not stop, and endless billboards, one of which declaimed the following handpainted entreaty: I NEED A KIDNEY, followed by a phone number that one can assume had only ever been dialed by wise-ass teenagers and recently-born-again Christians hoping to notch their first save.

  In contrast, Route 36 took us past beautiful, dismal old towns, crumbling houses, one-eyed dogs, and children pushing each other on tire swings.

  *

  Thirty-three years ago, when it was originally purchased by the original owner, my sedan had been equipped with air conditioning. By the time I’d purchased it from its seventh owner, the chlorofluorocarbons had fled the system, leaving the air conditioner completely ineffectual. To compensate, Vero and I drove with the windows down, bottles of fluorescent pink energy drinks sweating between our respective thighs.

  We survived the vast, unknowable emptiness of Kansas by listening to a George Jones cassette Veronica had lifted from a truck stop in Chillicothe, Missouri. Veronica told me that she’d once heard that George Jones was once at a urinal next to a man whom he suspected of sleeping with his wife, Tammy Wynette, and he, George, reached over and grabbed the man’s penile organ, saying, “I just wanted to see what she was so excited about.” Veronica could not recall how the incident was resolved.

  I said, “I wouldn’t guess he was a dick-grabber from listening to his music.”

  She said, “He’s also known for drinking in excess.”

  “That would explain why all of his songs concern alcoholism.”

  This conversation occurred as we were approaching the western border of Kansas, also known as the eastern border of Colorado.

  After “He Stopped Loving Her Today” made its seventh trip round, Veronica ejected the cassette and chucked it out the windo
w, whereupon, by pure chance, it collided with a speed limit sign and exploded into a string of magnetic tape, like the guts of a small, two-dimensional animal. Cheers all around.

  We twisted the radio dial. FM was altogether barren. AM yielded a solitary station, 1040 KORD out of a hamlet called Goodland. The robot DJ claimed that KORD—aka The Leopard (rowr!)—was the Home of the Best in Contemporary Country. With its endless variety of songs about nostalgia, American exceptionalism, and nostalgia for American exceptionalism, who were we to disagree?

  The broadcast was marred by static, caused by the wall of thunderclouds peeping over the horizon. White clouds with pompadours. White, turning an ominous shade of frostbite grey. Edges limned with sunlight. Image-wise, it was sub-postcard, but better than a poke in the eye.

  One of the things that had initially attracted me to Veronica was her insistence on maintaining an out-of-date beehive hairdo. She went so far as to procure her grooming services from an old folks’ home two bus transfers from my apartment. Our apartment. She’d moved in shortly after we’d consummated our relationship in the back seat of this very car. At the conclusion of the aforementioned consummation, she had pressed the button on my umbrella and popped it open. The batwings expanded and the metal mechanisms prodded my manly parts.

  I said to her then, “You’re inviting bad luck.”

  She picked a strand of my hair out of her teeth and said, “I wish I was eating a hamburger.”

  Which returns us to the near-present. As we approached the western edge of Kansas with the bubbling-hot plains passing by the opened windows, Veronica echoed those words from our first night of pleasure: “I wish I was eating a hamburger.”

  I said, “I wish I was a one-legged seagull.”

  We continued on our serpent’s tongue of a highway, no sign of hitchhikers, the clouds billowing upward. As we entered Colorado, we were welcomed by a sign that read, Welcome to Colorful Colorado. The sign itself was brown.

  I said, “They put the word ‘colorful’ on a brown sign in a sea of dead grass.”

  Veronica replied, “Every single person who’s ever passed that sign has made that exact comment, or thought it.” She then said something about fifty shades of beige. It shouldn’t have been funny, but I laughed, primarily because she said it with an Irish accent. She had a killer Irish accent, frequently peppered with terms like shillelagh and craic, and made more killer because Veronica Vasquez was not remotely Irish. I laughed secondarily because the quip combined a dig at brown signs, the celebration of Irish verdancy, and a reference to soft-core sado-masochistic shiterature. I’d repeat the quip, but I forget the exact wording, and you wouldn’t find it funny anyway.

  Back, now, in our home state, we sped along, craning our necks for a peek of a mountain peak. Any moment now, the Rockies would appear on the horizon, for we were in Colorado.

  In a little miracle of our rotating planet, the sun sank into that tiny two-inch space below the gaining thunderclouds and above the horizon and attempted to blind me. I lowered the visor, which did not go low enough. Veronica volunteered to place her left hand between my eyes and our orb. Thus did we continue apace.

  No mountain peaks. We passed a sign, black-and-white, that read, Welcome to Holliday, Home of the Harvesters. And then we were driving thru the town of Holliday itself. It’s hard to describe sixteen buildings as a town; it was more of a compound.

  Veronica spotted a restaurant and implored me to stop. Cookie’s Palace Diner, it was called. The car rolled onto the dirt parking lot and I extinguished the engine. Veronica and I sat a moment and pulled our shirts by the sternum, fanning the sweat. It was September first, shortly after seven PM, and the heat remained ridiculous.

  Inside the Palace, we sat across from one another at a table that could have fetched a hefty price in Denver’s retro-modern secondary market had its previously white top not been stained yellow from fifty years of mustard drippings and cigarette stubs. In its current state, it would only be useful as a prop in a true-to-life film about the time Veronica and I ate at this diner.

  The waitress was a little on the young and thin side, but she did call me “hon” and that made Veronica wink at me. I really did love Veronica.

  I apologize for the verbosity. The details remain vivid and I’m reluctant to gloss them over, as I suspect they will play a significant role in the narrative that follows. Or, poetically speaking, the flame has been extinguished but the match head remains hot enough to raise a blister. I intend to linger over that pain.

  We were less than three hours from home and I didn’t have a game until the next evening. The game would be a community fundraiser at the YMCA in Aurora, for which I would be paid forty American dollars. Pickings were slim in the summer.

  The point of the previous paragraph being, in spite of the blazing boredom of the countryside, Veronica and I enjoyed riding in a car together and, as a consequence, we weren’t in a hurry to get back to Denver. Consequently, I splurged and ordered the onion rings.

  “That’ll take an extra five minutes, hon.”

  “That’ll be fine, dear.”

  It took seven minutes, actually, but those extra two minutes were of little consequence. I was sitting across from my angelic Veronica. She had a Nefertiti way about her. Slender neck, confident jut of the chin, a mouth that simultaneously frowned and smirked. Her beehive fit her forehead perfectly. Much less ridiculous than that lampshade Queen Nefertiti had sported around the Nile.

  The burgers were thick and juicy, not the frozen patties you see so often in country diners. Veronica’s fries were thick and soggy, just like those you so often see in country diners. I let her eat freely of my onion rings, which were oniony and deep-friedy.

  Halfway thru our meal, the door to the Palace opened up and an old-timer in jeans and an oversized T-shirt silkscreened with the classic phrase Why you hatin’ on me? entered and settled at the counter.

  Veronica leaned across our table and whispered to me, “Because you let your granddaughter dress you, that’s why.” Tee hee hee. That’s what love is, making fun of old rural men.

  The old-timer and the waitress were familiar with one another and so they quickly dispensed with the how-do-you-do business, then parried with whether or not the boys were gonna be worth a lick in football this year, and then sojourned into the potential for rain. They concluded that a hellfire storm was fast approaching.

  According to Old Timer, a tornado watch had been announced on the radio. This inspired him to relate a story about one of his youthful cyclonic encounters. “I seen swine flying thru the air, just like in The Wizard of Oz.”

  Veronica whispered to me, “I hope this whole town gets picked up by a cyclone, us included. I’d give anything not to be in Kansas anymore.” That one didn’t even make sense, seeing as how we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Tee hee hee. Everything’s funny when you’re in love.

  Nature called. I excused myself and went to the bathroom, adding a bit of a bowleggedness to my stride in order to make a good impression on Old Timer.

  To the urinal, no sign of George Jones. As I unzipped, a rogue onion ring slipped out of the folds of my lap and landed on the floor. It was a tiny onion ring, small enough to fit snugly around a woman’s finger. As I made my water, I cast my eyes upon the ring, stuck to the floor, soaking up the splatter from my bladder, and I decided that the time was well-nigh for me to propose to my sweetheart.

  The decision was not altogether spontaneous—I’d wanted to marry her ever since she’d first popped the umbrella—but the timing had always been hard to pin down. As I would soon discover, there’s no time like the right-fucking-now.

  I concluded my business and washed my hands and then bent forward to pinch the onion ring up from the floor. Much of the batter slipped off, but as I held the thing in my palm it still sufficiently resembled an onion ring to serve my purpose.

  In a moment, I would propose in unconventional fashion to my gal in Cookie’s Palace Diner, in a town called Holliday,
under threat of tornados.

  As I turned the doorknob, I heard a faint rumble of thunder. I tugged the door open. It moved reluctantly, as if the hinges were in need of lubricant.

  I walked forward into the restaurant. The air felt thick. To the degree that I noticed this, I attributed it to a sharp increase in humidity that would presumably accompany the onset of a hellfire thunderstorm.

  My darling Veronica was holding a French fry in mid-air, stockstill. I assumed she was playing a prank. The waitress, whose nametag really did read “Flo,” was pouring coffee into Old Timer’s cup. Flo, too, was stock still, as was Old Timer.

  The room was as quiet as a dead branch.

  I thought, “It’s quite the send-up this crew is playing on me.”

  I did not know to what I could attribute the next thing I saw. The coffee, the stream of coffee that was coming from Flo’s pot, was frozen in midstream above Old-Timer’s cup. This tongue of coffee had cleared the coffee pot, but it hadn’t reached the cup. As practical jokes go, these jokers had pulled off a ten out of ten.

  I said, “Hey, now.”

  My voice made no proper sound.

  I approached Flo and waved my hand in front of her face. Her eyes did not follow. Frustrated, I took hold of her wrist and forced the coffee pot down to rest flat on the counter top. As I did so, the tongue of coffee stretched out, the tip of it remaining in place, the back of it remaining attached to the lip of the pot. More frustrated and more confused, I slapped the tongue of coffee with my right hand. I did it with the quickness with which one would slap a hornet that had alighted on one’s knee. Slap and pull the hand away before the hornet can sting. The coffee didn’t splash. Rather, it sort of flattened against the countertop, with a handprint in it.

  I wiped my hand against my pantleg, but there was no coffee to wipe off. And, while my hand was warm and my palm was red, the coffee hadn’t burned me.