Saturday Sample:The Last Casualty Mark Connelly

Big Wheels

 

After the NATO conference, the German major invited us to have lunch at the Bismarck downtown. All of us had tired of the kasino fare and were open to suggestions.

“Believe me, this place is different,” he told us. “At night,” he cautioned, “it’s a gay nightclub. But,” he held his hand up like a symphony conductor, “the lunch is fantastic. Largest wine list in the city. One thing about gays, they know their vintages.”

We climbed into his classic Mercedes, a humpbacked whale of a car right out of old gangster movies. It was two o’clock, and there was little traffic. It was a brilliant afternoon.  Glass office towers gleamed. Everything in the city was clean, new, and precise – almost to the point of being unreal. 

The car nosed around a corner and drove down a winding street. The hood ornament resembled a gun sight, guiding us through the cobbled alley jammed with battered Fiats and VW’s. The tires thudded on the worn stones. Pre-war Bronx-ugly tenements crowded the narrow streets. Old taverns stood on the corners, dark medieval-looking places with mullioned windows and sway-backed roofs. We were in the old part of the city, a few acres the Eighth Air Force had missed in 1944. 

We sped past dancing children and turned into a wide square. The Bismarck was a massive cream monument topping a small knoll. Gleaming in the sun, it resembled a wedding cake decorated with glazed columns and lacy scrollwork. We parked in front and climbed the smooth marble steps leading to immense chrome and glass doors. The entrance was all mirrors, movie posters, and dried flowers. In the center, a larger-than-life statue of David towered above a fountain, well-muscled and overly endowed.

A white-jacketed host led us to the main dining room beneath a dome supported by gilt columns. Sunbeams blazed through circular windows, filling the hall with light that danced on our silverware.

The major ordered, insisting we try the house special. “It’s fun.  A real adventure. Salad to start. Then eight cheeses and eight wines served with histories printed on little cards. It’s a guessing game!” He patted his flat stomach. “It kills the diet, but it’s worth it. Put in an extra half hour in the gym tomorrow. You have to live, right?”

      Our waiter, a sleek Italian youth, darted around us with ballet grace. Salad arrived on chilled plates and was presented with royal flourishes. The waiter carried the ornate pepper mill like an acolyte bearing a censer, twisting it over our salads with powerful delicacy. Bricks of cheese followed on wooden tablets. Wine came in communion trays. We tasted the first round.

“It’s a Mosel,” Dubinski suggested.

The major flipped the card over. “Correct. And the cheese?”

“It reminds me of mozzarella but firmer, with more flavor.”

My years in Wisconsin have made me something of an expert on cheese. “Danish Harvarti,” I said.

I got most of the cheeses right. I was dead wrong on all the wines. I can’t tell Chablis from Rhine. But I recognized Blue Nun when I tasted it and ordered a bottle from our waiter.

I got high. I stopped nibbling on cheese because all the white and yellow cubes began to taste like Blue Nun. Instead, I read the stack of little cards. I couldn’t concentrate on the Fraktur script histories of rivers, regions, and vintages. Something in the club distracted me. I looked up at the dome over us. No doubt the building had been bombed and shelled during the war. It could have been restored and remodeled three or four times. Something in the columns intrigued me. The bar was set on a raised platform, a dais in an alcove that might have been an altar at one time. The ceiling bore an unusual fixture as if something had hung there. Boyhood memories were coming back . . . after school lessons with bearded, hatted men, the sing-song incantations, ancient texts. . . I turned and asked the German officer next to me, a city native.

“Yes. . . ” he answered, hesitating, “. . . before the war, in the old days, it used to be a synagogue.”

I nodded and drank Blue Nun. At the bar two blond youths in leather jackets and boots were drinking beer from foaming steins, exchanging sexual glances. 

“Did you see the job that M60 did on that streetcar downtown?” Dubinksi asked, his eyes glowing.

Two months before, an enlisted man, for reasons unknown, stole a tank and lumbered through the city business district, crashing into parked cars and knocking over kiosks. Flattened Audis and BMWs attested to the power of NATO armor. The story is popular and generally leads to drunk driving jokes. Nobody seems to recall that the soldier’s last act was driving off a bridge and drowning in the Rhine.

Everyone laughed.

“It’s still a good tank. Only we need two thousand more at least.”

The German major grew serious. “What we really need is an adequate supply of spare parts and a smooth system of distribution. Standardization, supply, organization – those are the key to any sustained conflict. It’s not so easy when every nation’s army in the alliance has to support its country’s defense industry. You drive Chryslers. The Italians have to have Fiats. I see the Greeks are buying tanks from Spain. Supplying parts in a war will be hell.”

“What I want to know,” Dubinski asked, “is why Germans put those monstrous wheels on everything that moves. Armored cars, weapons carriers, personnel carriers, scout cars. Their wheels are always as high as a house.”

“It’s simple  . . .  einfach . . .” The German major smiled. “We learn our lessons. The next time we move east, we won’t get stuck in the mud. Prosit!”  

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About the author

Mark Connelly was born in Philadelphia and grew up in New Jersey.  He attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he received an MA in Creative Writing and a Ph.D. in English.  His non-fiction books include The Diminished Self: Orwell and the

Loss of Freedom, Orwell and Gissing, The IRA on Film and Television, and The Group Theatre:  An Enduring Legacy.  His fiction has appeared in Bristol Noir, The Berlin Review, Mobius Blvd., The Brussels Review, and Bristol Futurist.  In 2005 Texas Review Press

published his novella Fifteen Minutes, which received the Clay Reynolds Award.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Saturday Sample: Fish head by Johnny Payne, still water,

 

 

 

 

Fish Head

 

 

It was hardly worthy of remark that he’d been born with the head of a fish. His condition, if you could call it that, wasn’t terribly different he imagined from coming into the world deaf. From the first day you didn’t know anything but a lack of sound. Only by other people’s reactions did you begin to be aware that you were categorized as rare. You wouldn’t necessarily have thought of a fish head as a defect until somebody pointed out that it was, making fun of you or simply stopping to stare as if you were a spectacle on display in a museum of taxidermy.

Sporting a fish head had its advantages. An early girlfriend had been attracted because of his blubbery lips and told him he was a great kisser. Another liked the attention she got when he and she went out dancing, how every human head would turn, and somehow, she managed to convince herself that it was her beauty, rather than his goggle eyes, which fascinated passersby. Still another girl just liked fish. She had an aquarium with a miniature treasure chest inside, wavy plants and was always testing the Ph of the water so it wouldn’t get out of balance. In the end he did turn out to be a temporary novelty for these females. They left Walter as easily as they’d taken him up. He joked to himself about it calling their behavior “catch and release.” His friends got the reference and laughed alongside, but something about the phrase made them nervous.

Some of his buddies liked to hang around him to show that they weren’t prejudiced. In their minds, they had “street” if they got seen in the company of Walter, taking a puff of the same cigarette that he’d been smoking, to prove that they weren’t grossed out by his wet mouth. To be sure there were social disadvantages. A group of guys at school started shouting out “Mackerel!” in disparaging voices as he passed. He couldn’t figure out why they’d settled on that variety of fish, given that it was commercially successful.  Their town had a profitable mackerel cannery that employed many of the parents, and mackerel was said to have a mild and pleasant flavor. Not that Walter had tasted it, because that might be cannibalism.

For health reasons he was vegan, so anything with a face was off the list. It did weird him out to watch anybody eating seafood, though he tried not to let on. He would get choked up and pretend into his napkin that he was suffering from seasonal allergies. Friends in his clique would hesitate at a restaurant before choosing fish and chips or fried catfish off the menu.   They would end up changing their minds, even when he tried to reassure them that he was not related to those species. In truth, he didn’t really know his parentage.

Walter had been raised by a minister and his wife, who had adopted him from an orphanage. They were kind, but they made it clear they didn’t want to talk about his past and he never got the courage to investigate the matter on his own, as they might have perceived his initiative as a betrayal. They said he was their son, they loved him, and they didn’t understand why he was concerned about his origins. “You’re just like us, because we raised you,” they insisted and were proud to have him squeezed between them in the Christmas photo, almost defiantly sending that picture out to friends and implicitly daring them to raise any issues about him being different. Without a doubt, those friends talked among themselves, but no one at church or in their circle was brave enough to point to his difference from everybody else. In fact, he sang in the choir. To put everyone at ease, he made an awkward joke about singing bass, but that didn’t go over because bass was only an eye rhyme. Also, because he was a high tenor.

Despite Google, Walter hadn’t been able to determine his species. Even if he were in fact a bass, would he be large mouth, small mouth, spotted, or striped? Then again, the shape of his face seemed more like a blue gill’s—unless it was a bream’s. His markings and features were ambiguous. He could really argue it in any direction, from day to day. It was a shame facial recognition software hadn’t yet developed to the stage that you could take a picture of your head and a database in some department of zoology would provide an instant match, or at least percentages of probability. His phenotype and traits didn’t point to anything obvious or specific. Rather, his head looked like an amalgamation of different species, like a child’s idea of a fish drawn with crayon except with a human body. A head alone wasn’t enough to conclude with even remote accuracy. Perhaps if his whole body had been that of a fish, he’d have had enough to go on. Then again, if he were all fish, he wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. He’d have been swimming with his school in some lake or other, acting instinctively and experiencing low level thoughts, mostly about food and sheltering from predators.

At school, he sensed a protective bubble formed by his teachers and the principal, as though the matter had been discussed at the faculty lounge, possibly as a handicap needing protected status. Or an endangered species. A sense of threat remained ever present, minimally represented by his being called mackerel. On the faces of those boys, he could see that if they’d had their way, they’d catch him unawares behind the school and beat him, maybe even decapitate him if they’d been able to give absolute free rein to their hostile desires.

Then the inevitable happened. A car pulled to the curb on a side street one day, when he was walking home from his part time job at the car wash. It was a shortcut he never had dared to take, but he was simply tired that day from buffing all the cars in the autumn chill and wanted to be home nursing a hot herbal tea. Four guys piled out, ones he recognized from their matching cage-fighter buzz-cuts but barely knew. With practiced speed, they stuffed him in the trunk of the car, closed it, and sped off. Too late, he realized that they’d gone through the auto-wash not long before to scope him out and be sure he was at work.

Consumed with abject terror, he focused on not peeing his pants. He’d been too lazy to relieve himself in the car wash’s grimy, tiny employee bathroom before clocking out. Walter listened to the car’s tires traverse regular highway pavement, clearly going out of town, as they didn’t slow for any stoplights. Then the vehicle went off the pavement along a bumpy road, seemingly gravel. When the trunk opened, he saw branches overhanging and green light filtering through. The boys had the smug smiles of somebody who can kill you or not, as they please. One was holding a big knife, as if he were going to decapitate Walter or fillet him, but then another said, “Put that in the car, don’t be an idiot,” and the knife-wielder complied. They marched their prisoner to the edge of the town reservoir by the city which was stocked with fish, such as trout and bass. For a modest fee you could fish, and when Walter had come out here once to make out with the girl who liked his lips, he’d seen old guys casting from the shore. At that moment, there was no one else in sight, unfortunately.

“Go back to your own kind,” commanded the one who was clearly a ringleader.  He had a weird growth on the side of his nose that easily could have been fixed through cosmetic surgery.  But his parents probably thought that having a wart or tumor on his face made him look more masculine. Walter knew his parents would have taken care of such a detail if that had happened to him.

“I don’t know what my own kind are,” Walter observed. “There are six or eight different varieties in this lake alone, and it’s a crapshoot as to whether I belong to any of them. I doubt it. I’m more like a mestizo.”

The ringleader cuffed him. “Don’t be smart. I mean they’re fish. They all look the same.”

“They don’t. Have you ever examined them closely?”

“No, because they’re not my relatives.”

 “Each type has different colored scales and gills. Their fins have dissimilar shapes. Some types of fish are several times as large as the others.”

“You should be on the Nature Channel as a host, dude,” offered one of the malevolent foursome with what seemed genuine enthusiasm. “That would be cool. They could call it Fish on Fish.”

“Listen, asshole. You’re a freak show. It makes me sick to see you walking down the hall with your arm around a girl. You disgust me. I think about you making a baby on one of them and I almost lose my mind.”

“I’m pretty sure a fish head is a recessive gene,” offered Walter, improvising, as if to mitigate the situation.

“I don’t care. You’re a mutant, like that guy in The Fly. They should have killed you at birth.”

“Come on, Trey. That’s harsh.”

“Shut up, Beaver. Or you’ll be riding in the trunk on the way back. Now, Fish Boy, get in the lake and swim to your ancestors.”

Ironically, Walter didn’t know how to swim. He’d asked his parents to give him lessons, but they were funny about it, not wanting to lump him in the category of swimmers. That skill would have made him more like his birth parent. In truth, he had a hunch that he could have excelled on the swim team, probably been a star, unless rival schools made an issue of his head implying he had an unfair advantage. At bottom, apart from seeing swimming as a birthright, Walter instinctively knew that learning to swim was a sheer survival skill. And now he’d come to that exact crux.

Without further ado, Trey pushed Walter into the water, whereupon he stumbled in the mud and fell face down getting a couple of ounces of the acrid lake in his nostrils. As Trey began to kick him in the behind, he coughed. To escape the foot flogging, Walter crawled forward through the muck, going in deeper, until the slimy floor fell away, and he was left in opaque liquid. Without question, he was going to die. He would drown pathetically in the town reservoir.  The boys would go up for murder, or just as likely, they’d go free, as there were no witnesses. The other three boys would be too afraid of Trey to crack and confess. Unless Beaver turned out to have a heart and a conscience after all, which was possible.

The water invaded Walter’s lungs, and he prepared mentally for the death agony.  His limbs flailed, at first as hysterical spasms then in slower motion. In the mud-stained water, he saw a fish body pass by, then another, disappearing and circling back to cruise past his other side. Pathetically, despite his weak display of pseudo knowledge on the shore, he knew nothing about fish. It was as though he’d been ashamed to really learn the taxonomy and the biology of his so-called kind. His stance had been evasion. More fish crowded around Walter, silver and brown, plump and slender, and he became aware that he was breathing underwater. His arms and legs had relaxed and were swimming. He could see, or perhaps sense, with greater clarity what was going on around him. Particles hung suspended in a shaft of light penetrating the surface. What from above would have showed as open water held rock shelves, places for aquatic life to rest, hide, dart in and out of, populate. Fish were observing him, some touching his sides and head with their scales, as if to encourage, others keeping their distance simply curious about this hybrid creature in their midst, so like them yet so unlike them.

On he swam, no longer caring, exploring the lake with ever stronger kicks and strokes. He half-expected that he would metamorphose into one of them. He’d stay here underwater, maybe for an hour or two, maybe for a day. Maybe for a long time. Maybe forever. He nipped at a strand of algae with his mouth. It tasted like kombu. Perfect for a vegan.

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About the Author

Johnny Payne is a novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright and essayist.  He directs the MFA in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary's University, Los Angeles.  Often, he has written about his native Kentucky and sometimes enjoys writing historically.  His novels have been set in England, Ireland, Peru and various places in the U.S. Payne enjoys changing styles and experimenting with form as he explores the full range of his characters' emotions and psyches.  Frequently his writing examines the comic and absurd side of humanity.  Payne was the founding director of the first bilingual Spanish-English MFA in the United States.

 \Did you enjoy the story? Would you like to shout us a coffee? Half of what you pay goes to the author the other half goes to expenses e.g. Maintaining the web site and setting up The Best of Café Lit book each year.