The Fiction of Owen Thomas

Next (“The Cages”)

A Novella

Excerpt A

The Dingo Man, she thought, was mailing a box of old letters to a woman who no longer loved him.  Years of ardent declaration returned to the source. Keepsakes to be kept no longer. What was once eternal suddenly reduced to historical fact.  She – the woman to whom the box had been addressed with a firm hand—would not see this coming.  She would hand the postal clerk a pink slip and he would retrieve an eleven pound box and she would see that the box was from him, the Dingo Man, and when she got back to her car and opened the box she would hear the echo of her own declaration of independence and it would wound her to the core and she would dissolve into tears in the post office parking lot.  And then, on the way back home, she would wish she could go back to the way things were in spite of it all.

But the Dingo Man passed the old Post Office without even slowing.  At the stop sign he made a left on Jefferson and then another left on Springfield, heading back the direction from which they had come.

He’s lost, she thought. I’m following a tourist.

No, she corrected herself, he’s not sightseeing.  He’s looking for someone.  For her house.  For her work. He’s making amends.  He has things to say that can only be said in person. He won’t leave until he’s said them.

A police cruiser hissed past her, headed west, and she remembered.

All state cruisers reminded her of her father. Her family was full of cops going back to her great grandfather, Stacey Lumm, who served thirty-five years as Sheriff of Summit County, back when the name Stacey could still connote a sense of virility.  The story was that Sheriff Lumm lived to one hundred and one and still had his wits about him. His grandson, her father, would soon be only seventy-six and the wits were long gone.

The siren wailed behind her. The watery red and blue smears out the back window. Smaller and smaller.

Well, it wasn’t his fault, she reminded herself. She should call him.  He won’t remember her, she knew.  But she should call anyway. He’s used to not knowing the people who seem to know him. The people on the refrigerator.  The people on the mantle and on the wall in the study. He has people to sing to him.  To help blow out the candles.  To remind him of his name and the day he was born.  Maribel bet herself that Claire would be right there with him.  Like a wife.  Like a soul mate.  But still.  She should call for his birthday.  And that would be enough.  She didn’t need to fly out to see him this year.  It’s not like he remembered the visit last year and was expecting another.  It’s not like he knew she even existed, let alone her name. If he could not remember his own daughter, then he also could not remember that she had kept her mother’s secret.  Or that the first time he had wandered off into the night was more than Maribel could stomach and that she had abandoned him to his fate.

She did not have her sister’s penchant for familial sacrifice. Why remind him? This year she would just call.

The red smears were like wet, seeping wounds that would not be cleaned or staunched.  The Dingo Man turned off the road onto a slab of asphalt that belonged to Shocks & Struts, a low, gray, windowless cinderblock of a building surrounded by flooded potholes.  Red neon beer signs adorned the exterior.  A poster promising Ladies Night incentives had been tacked to the door at three of its corners, the fourth curling in the wet air up towards the center. 

Maribel drove past the building, turned around and parked on the opposite side of the street.  The Dingo Man slipped his silver bullet into a parking space near the back of a building.  He turned off his lights and cut the engine.  Maribel did the same.

It was not what she had expected of him; this place.  Not that she was disappointed exactly. She was not supposed to have expectations anyway.  That was not the point.  Understanding, yes.  Curiosity, yes.  But not the fulfillment of expectation. Expectation imprisoned the mind. We will see what we expect to see.  Experience what we expect to experience.  We expect and then we repeat.  We repeat and we are not free.  We are not free and we are not happy.  Which is what history teaches us to expect out of life in the first place but we follow expectation anyway.

So she told herself to remain open; uncommitted to outcome.

The Dingo Man climbed out of his car and closed and locked the door.  He wore a black baseball hat now.  He kept his head bent down and his arms up against the rain, moving quickly for the door.  It opened and swallowed him whole like a gray concrete toad eating a bug.

Maribel put the seat back and stared out at the relentless sky through the moon roof.  Thunder, suddenly, from somewhere beneath her, under the street.  China exploding. She turned off the radio and closed her eyes and tried to feel the sound deep within her chest, radiating out in waves that moved through her bones. 

Evan would be home in another three hours. There would be more angst. She should go buy some fish and make a salad. Buy some wine.  What vintage went with angst?  What if the angst was only the shallow superstitious kind; an offering to the disturbingly whimsical God of Forgone Conclusions?  Evan should know better; the job was his for the taking. Like everything. He just wasn’t one for tempting fate.  Angst was part of the process; a distraction as he secretly counted his chickens.

She wondered what he would say to her if he knew. If he knew what?  What was there to know?  If he knew that she had two short days a week at the zoo? If he knew how she had fallen to filling those days before he came home? He would understand.  He would understand that he did not understand.  That, sometimes, was an acceptable state of affairs when it came to relationships. But then that was Evan.  He always understood more than she did.

There was a sharp sensation, stabbing through the flesh of her lids, of the world blowing to pieces and vanishing in a silent, brilliant pulse.  She opened her eyes as the light vanished and sound from everywhere split the moment like an atom.  It was just enough to trigger the impulse, pushing her to act against her better inclinations.  She climbed out into the rain, slammed the door and made for the building that had swallowed the Dingo Man.