Felicity was good at silence. Better than me. She seemed to have no anxiety about what lay up ahead. She could take it or leave it. My fear of her mounted until I leaped up from the couch and tried to make up some excuse to go outside. Nothing had changed in her. She just kept sitting on the wicker chair in the same way she had before, with the patent-leather purse in her lap.
I ran outside to the back porch and started tossing all the pails of warm slimy dog water out and refilling them. Just for something to do. You can see them through the glazed window, leaning toward the target. Three of them this time, still dressed up in their pin-striped suits, fedora hats, and those shoes you always see them wearing in black-and-white movies—pointed—brogans, I guess.
With little indented holes or perforations in the pattern. None of these characters look like actors, but they all seem to be playing a role. Inside, the other three are laughing and chewing on toothpicks as one of them throws his set of darts at the wall.
Each time he throws he leans in, squints his eyes, and makes three little practice strokes with his right arm before releasing. My tiny dead father, still wrapped in plastic, and two of the shrunken women are hung on the target by the necks with pink rubber bands.
They bob up and down ever so slightly as the darts zoom past their heads. One dart with red feathers and a golden streamlined point hits my father square in the forehead and sticks. The tiny body spins. The gangsters are hysterical with laughter as they take sips of their drinks and adjust the bold knots of their ties. Two more darts are thrown at my father, who is still spinning.
They both miss. One grazes his shoulder and clatters to the floor. One guy makes a yellow mark on a chalkboard. The third guy drops a dime in a Wurlitzer. This is about all I can remember. I told Felicity she had to stop coming around like this—why was she always coming around when she knew my dad was at work?
I mean, why was she always coming around? She moved the little black purse on her knees. This time she was wearing cutoff bluejeans and boots with red flowers and pistols carved into them. Very Western. She asked me if there was some law against her coming by my place and paying me a visit. She just wanted to see the dogs, anyway, she said. Maybe pick some oranges. Run through the sprinklers. I thought that was great, but at the same time I wondered if that was the way my dad would see it.
I mean, what did that mean to her? Did that mean that, when I looked at her purse moving around on her knees, that was all I was looking at? Start listening to music by Tommy Dorsey. What if Felicity decided to track me down? What if my father found out? What if he decided to do me in or have me arrested or something?
What if he went completely crazy? There was some great-great-something—an uncle or a cousin or something—who ran off to live with the Indians back then, had many wives, many children, stopped speaking English altogether, took up astrology, had Cherokee slaves.
I had to find a way out of there. She felt huge. I was lost in her body. The floorboards were rock-hard on my knees. I was sure her voice would carry for at least twenty acres.
Over the heads of grazing cattle, frantic lizards. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and she took big fistfuls of my hair. After days of her waiting for him, he finally shows up in the middle of all this!
It was unbearable to imagine! I rode her like a pony, trying to stay on. She slipped away, grabbing me between the legs and shoving me into her.
It was an incredible mess. Cum all over the place. She jumped up suddenly, gathered all her clothes, and ran out the front door, half naked, then turned on the porch and ran back in, and got on top of me.
I was still stretched out, bewildered. I thought she was going to crush me. The sheer weight of her. Her pelvic bone.
Her mouth opened and I saw tiny animals escaping, tiny animals that were trapped inside her all this time. They flew out as though something might catch them and drag them back into imprisonment. I could feel them land on my face and crawl through my hair, searching for a hiding place. Each time she screamed, the animals flew out in small clouds like tiny gnats: little dragons, flying fish, headless horses. They came tumbling out, scratching at one another. The amazing thing was that I stayed hard all this time.
Even after ejaculating all over. I was as hard as a stone salute. I avoided my father after that. I could see him at dusk in his rocker, with a glass of whiskey and a glass of milk beside it, picking at the shrapnel scars on the back of his neck and staring at nothing from the front porch. I kept thinking that he somehow knew about me and Felicity. That that was why he was always staring off into the distance. Why would he wait? If he kicked me out, where would I end up?
These were the kinds of things I thought of as I wandered farther and farther from the house. As it turned to night, I kept a bead on the kitchen light. I stumbled through plow ruts and tried to keep to the very edge of the fields, so as not to disturb seedbeds or crops already heading out. Our sheep heard me coming and bolted off in a burst of gray, away from the wire fence.
I saw his bedroom light switch on and knew that he was brushing his teeth, with the glass of whiskey resting on the porcelain sink beside him. A pure-white owl dived at a field mouse, snagged it, then flapped away into the dark. Would I have asked him who he was? Who he pretended to be? Would I have asked him what was on his mind?
Did he think I might have fooled around with her behind his back? Got her hot and bothered? Caused those red blotches to emerge on her neck and face? Did he think I might be the one she really loved? They are at the beach now.
Carpinteria or Ventura—very bright and hot. All the windows are rolled down and the trunk is wide open. Salty air sweeps through it, blowing sand against the whitewalls, half burying them. None of the miniature corpses are in evidence. Just the car—as though it had been abandoned in haste. Just wind. Wind again. Seagulls circle above them, waiting for the chance to carry one of them off and tear it apart.
The gangsters lie in a line right beside the corpses. Two of them have their shirts off and are applying baby oil to their dark-olive skin. None of them wear sunblock. They wiggle their manicured toes in the sand and whistle at young girls strolling by.
They call a group of girls over and show them the line of miniature corpses all on their backs. Taking the sun. The girls run away in horror, screaming, covering their noses, although the smell of death is very faint through the Saran Wrap. One of them runs toward the sea as though she were about to vomit. A black waiter shows up in a tuxedo and white gloves, driving an electric golf cart. They all order mojitos, except one, who orders a vodka tonic. The black waiter jumps back on his electric golf cart, after writing down their orders, and heads off toward the clubhouse.
You can just make out the roof over a distant ridge, where a group of slender palms are swaying. The thing you remember most about feedlots is the smell—the smell, way before seeing the actual cattle, usually Holstein crosses huddled in tight, listless bands on top of mounds of their own dung. Mornings in the San Joaquin always carry a mist.
Its origins are mysterious, because there is hardly any moisture to speak of. No water, except for the placid irrigation ditches: the giant rainbirds dripping; white transportable plastic pipes at the edge of rows of lettuce. We used to call it Tule Fog when we worked alfalfa, loading trucks with square bales in the summer.
That was farther south, though, down around Chino, where there was more green and it actually rained a little. I put it in my head that I could walk the seventeen miles to the feedlot on the fifth straight day that Felicity showed up and was, again, asking to see my old man, who was never there. I invited her in, as usual, out of the blasting sun, sat her down, as always, on the wicker chair, and poured the usual jar of iced tea for her.
She sat exactly the same way she always did—with her back straight and her spine not being supported by the chair at all. She set the little black purse on the floor and balanced the iced tea in the same way—on her knees, which were always pressed together and very tanned. I ran for about a hundred yards, until my lungs ached, then walked in long strides down to Highway 5.
Meadowlarks trilled, then exploded out of a field of barley, landing on mesquite posts. Grasshoppers were everywhere, and bottle flies would go smack into your eyes, as though blind and suicidal. Crews of Japanese field hands were working strawberry patches in straw hats shaped like chocolate drops. A sort of little raggedy monologue, as I marched my way toward the blur of occasional cars, on their journey up to San Francisco or down to L. I mean, maybe you could just go down to the liquor store and give her a call.
Or a note. It would almost be like talking to her. Your face. As though you were actually talking to her. You know? The whole situation.
I think she really likes you. She does. The way she talks about you. I make things up. The hike to Coalinga was hot and dusty. Occasionally, some old faggot insurance salesman.
You can spot them right away. Driving alone. A bunch of suits and shirts on wire hangers behind him. His red balls hanging out of his fly. I plodded on in the gravel ditch, through disposable diapers, bottle caps, and used condoms. Crows and mockingbirds dotted the fence lines. White almond trees in full bloom. Boxes of bees pollinating apricots. Now and then a roadside fruit stand selling figs and watermelon. I could hardly wait to get out of this place.
I started thinking about how Felicity might have found us. How come she could have just showed up here in this godforsaken valley. The cops. My dad. He just drives a pickup. Up and down the rows of cows, bawling and waiting for alfalfa pellets. Maybe the two of them have a place here. Somewhere in town. And the mother sends Felicity out here every day. Day after day. Like some kind of bait. I wonder. It is summer. Not that her mother gives a hoot in hell about education.
When I finally reached the feedlot, there was nothing but cattle and dust and a stench that made your eyes water. Miles of cattle. All kinds. All sizes. The air seemed as if there might be a war nearby. That was what it felt like. War and death. Mass graves. No human beings. Nothing but the constant sound of cattle bawling, as though their mothers were eternally lost. I saw a pickup truck, miles up one of the alleys.
It would stop periodically. A man would get out and dump a bag of feed into the troughs, then run a pitchfork over the top of it as the heads of cattle poked through the pipes and lolled their long slimy white tongues over the green pellets. The man dumped the empty bag and the pitchfork in the back of the pickup, then jumped behind the wheel. I stood there for the longest time, just watching. I was sure it was my father.
Who else would it be? I turned and walked away, all seventeen miles back to the house. When I got there, Felicity was gone.
Why or how he was shrunken in those various dreams and apparitions is beyond me. Whether he shrank before or after his death on this earth was another question I had. I've had a tiny Hindu man living in my belly for years. I don't think he'd allow another tiny man in the house.
This is the most original question I've seen on this site is forever Sign Up Now! Sort Girls First Guys First. I love this question because I've always wondered what girls would do with a guy like me. It has taken me roughly 3 hours to type this going from letter to letter on the keyboard.
Skittlez2 Xper 3. Aww I would keep him play with him and take care of him. That would be so cool. I would say hello, pick him up and talk to him. I'd then pull out my old dolls house and let him leave in that :p. What kind of things would you talk with him :. LOL I would pick him up and take him to my house and make him a mansion out of my shoe box. If you were bored what would you do with him for fun?
Stick to weed, cocaine is a hell of a drug. Related myTakes. What God teaches about forgiveness. It's Not Always Funerial.
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