The Bazaar of Bad Dreams

‘You need to see to your business, Mr Burkett,’ she tells him. Her tone is both reprimanding and flirtatious. Ray thinks she might be another mercy-fuck possibility.

He looks at the clock over the counter. It’s the kind with a beer advertisement on it. Almost two hours have gone by since Mary went sidling between the car and the cinderblock side of the Quik-Pik. And for the first time he thinks of Biz.

When he opens the door, heat rushes out at him, and when he puts his hand on the steering wheel to lean in, he pulls it back with a cry. It’s got to be a hundred and thirty in there. Biz is dead on his back. His eyes are milky. His tongue is protruding from the side of his mouth. Ray can see the wink of his teeth. There are little bits of coconut caught in his whiskers. That shouldn’t be funny, but it is. Not funny enough to laugh, but funny in a way that’s some fancy word he can’t quite think of.

‘Biz, old buddy,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I forgot all about you.’

Great sadness and amusement sweep over him as he looks at the baked Jack Russell. That anything so sad should still be funny is just a crying shame.

‘Well, you’re with her now, ain’t you?’ he says, and this thought is so sad – yet so sweet – that he begins to cry. It’s a hard storm. While he’s crying it comes to him that now he can smoke all he wants, and anywhere in the house. He can smoke right there at her dining room table.

‘You’re with her now, Biz, old buddy,’ he says through his tears. His voice is clogged and thick. It’s a relief to sound just right for the situation. ‘Poor old Mary, poor old Biz. Damn it all!’

Still crying, and with the purple kickball still tucked under his arm, he goes back into the Quik-Pik. He tells Mr Ghosh he forgot to get cigarettes. He thinks maybe Mr Ghosh will give him a pack of Premium Harmonys on the house as well, but Mr Ghosh’s generosity doesn’t stretch that far. Ray smokes all the way to the hospital with the windows shut and Biz in the backseat and the air-conditioning on high.

Thinking of Raymond Carver

Sometimes a story arrives complete – a done thing. Usually, though, they come to me in two parts: first the cup, then the handle. Because the handle may not show up for weeks, months, or even years, I have a little box in the back of my mind full of unfinished cups, each protected in that unique mental packing we call memory. You can’t go looking for a handle, no matter how beautiful the cup may be; you have to wait for it to appear. I realize that metaphor sort of sucks, but when you’re talking about the process we call creative writing, most of them do. I have written fiction all my life, and still have very little understanding of how the process works. Of course, I don’t understand how my liver works, either, but as long as it keeps doing its job, I’m good with that.

About six years ago, I saw a near-miss accident at a busy intersection in Sarasota. A cowboy driver tried to wedge his bigfoot truck – the kind with the huge tires – into a left-turn lane already occupied by another bigfoot truck. The guy whose space was being encroached upon hit his horn, there was a predictable screech of brakes, and the two gas-guzzling behemoths ended up inches apart. The guy in the turn lane unrolled his window and raised one finger to the blue Florida sky in a salute that is as American as baseball. The fellow who had almost hit him returned the greeting, along with a Tarzan chest-thump that presumably meant Do you want a piece of me? Then the light turned green, other drivers began to honk, and they went on their way with no physical confrontation.

The incident got me thinking about what might have happened if the two drivers had emerged from their vehicles and started duking it out right there on the Tamiami Trail. Not an unreasonable imagining; road rage happens all the time. Unfortunately, ‘it happens all the time’ is not a recipe for a good story. Yet that near-accident stuck with me. It was a cup with no handle.

A year or so later, while eating lunch in an Applebee’s with my wife, I saw a man in his fifties cutting up an elderly gent’s chopped steak. He did it carefully, while the elderly gent stared vacantly over his head. At one point the old guy seemed to come around a little, and tried to grab the utensils, presumably so he could attend to his own meal. The younger man smiled and shook his head. The elderly gent let go and resumed his staring. I decided they were father and son, and there it was: the handle for my road rage cup.

Batman and Robin

Have an Altercation