Plucking the moon from the Bottom of the Ocean

No one lives in my house now. You can tell because, at night, there are no lights. People should have lights on at night. Not too late at night, people have to sleep, but around dinnertime or just after, when people go to the den to watch Get Smart or something else with a laugh track, something that makes you laugh at the right time, and not the wrong time, as I do during a murder on Manix, or Secret Agent unless I don’t laugh at all, because I’m stuck doing dishes and being yelled at, or smacked around for not doing them well or fast enough. That’s no laughing matter. That’s when people should have lights on in their dens, kitchens, and living rooms, as we did back then when a thirteen-year-old was getting backhanded and kicked. Somebody walking by would have seen that with all those lights on. That’s what you’d think. But not my house, as if it was invisible, and everything that went on there that nobody saw or chose to see. And now my house stays dark all the time, is my guess.

In the Samuels’s house next door, Mr. Samuels took a Sunbeam iron (just like the one we had), and instead of pressing out the wrinkles in one of those rip-off Oxford shirts he wore with the polo player hammering his heart out with a mallet, he knocked Mrs. Samuels to the floor. Talk about what goes on inside a house. He left a pope’s hat impression where one of the high cheekbones, the left one, I think, one of them anyway, was. She had those high, razor-cut Veronica Lake cheekbones, but now that one got mashed down like it deflated, like taking all the hot air from a hot air balloon. The force of the iron moved one-half of her face, so it crossed to the other side, leaving her like a cyclops, only she still had two eyes, but them all crushed together after he’d swung that iron with the full force of his arm, his forearm, all the way back from his shoulder like it was a sideways pendulum from a Mr. E. A. Poe story. The stainless steel, ceramic-coated bottom of the iron wasn’t stainless now. At least, that’s what I saw for myself when Mr. Samuels, after he’d done it, came out of his house and took me to see what he’d done. It’s not like you’d think — that I hunkered below the kitchen window, peering in, like some kind of Kilroy-psycho-pervert, into the Samuels’s window at all those daisies decorating the backsplash behind the kitchen sink when it happened. I’m no peeping Tom.

When you’re thirteen, people either want you to go away, or if you won’t do that, they want you seen and not heard. That’s how I met up with Mr. Samuels. Mom, Lucky, Sukie, and Gerty were yelling things like “One bam!”, “Two dot!”, “Three crack!”, “You’re dead!” playing that Jewish/Chinese game, you won with special hands, like The Thirteen Orphans or Chow, Pung, or Kong of Three Dragons. Every Tuesday afternoon, the ladies bent over their tiles on the collapsible card table, their rear ends and thighs fluffed out like clouds of mashed potatoes over the sides of their folding chairs. They played in the living room; the table aligned perfectly with the room\'s walls and stank up the air with overly sweet old lady perfume and talcum powder. Mom played Mahjong to take her mind off the suicide-by-shotgun that killed my father a year ago. I’d been upstairs when he did it in the kitchen, barrel to mouth, Hemingway style. My bedroom was right above the kitchen, so the floor buckled with the impact of the blast. Little red/brown stains speckled the ceiling now, above the Formica-topped kitchen table like he’d planted a field of dead flowers there to remember him by. The windows rattled; the blast from that shotgun was so loud.

They were loud, too, the Mahjong ladies, and getting louder, the volume going up as the level in the frosted vodka bottle went down. And me, being sensitive to loud noises, now, how I can’t stand loud noises, now, how loud noises make me shake from the inside out, all over my body, now, came down from my room, stood right next to my mom’s left ear, and asked if she and her lady friends could “shut the FUCK UP!” She slapped me so hard I fell to the floor right on my butt.

Well, that ended the shouting at the Mahjong table. Lucky, Sukie, and Gerty stopped yelling and laughing and looked up and stared at me and Mom like the three heads of Cerberus salivating at the gates of hell.

“Now go upstairs and play with your dolls, or do your homework, or something, but leave us ladies alone,” she said, all quiet-scary, like words slipping out of a snake. “How many times do I have to tell you…”

And she went on and on like that until I couldn’t hear her anymore ‘cause I’d gotten up and stormed out, crying. The kitchen door spoke for me as the tension spring hooked through two eyelets, one on the molding and one on the door, yanked it back with such force it sounded like a gunshot. “One BAM!” I said to myself, whirled around, and held my index finger forward and my thumb up while all my other fingers lay back across my palm to make a gun aimed at my mom.

The game had gone long, so when I got outside, Mr. Samuels had just returned from work. He did something, like steam fitting, somewhere that didn’t seem worth it. He never made enough money, as I understand it, and Mrs. Samuels never let him forget it.

“Why don’t we never go nowhere? All my friends at the hair parlor go places. Out to Vincenzo’s, for instance. Betty and Rick always going out for a nice dinner. And Sally. Sally said, come Christmas, she and Bob are going to Florence! Florence, Italy! Did you hear that! Not us, though. I just go from one stinking room of this house to the other. And God only knows what the hell you do. I’m forgetting what outside looks like; it\'s been so long. I should have married Bob. Don’t know what he sees in that Sally. Except what every man sees in that Sally.”

Things like that, she’d say. Words to make Mr. Samuels feel inadequate, like for all the work he did — getting up so early it was still dark, coming back late, and then having to listen to that! I watched his head sink into his shoulders like in James Thurber\'s cartoon as he entered the side door just off his driveway, off his kitchen. Then I heard them arguing. And then a thud, like a sack of cinderblocks hitting the floor.

Moments later, the side door flung open, and Mr. Samuels stood at the threshold, heaving like someone had inserted bellows in his chest and pumped it rhythmically, in and out. His speech came in those breaths. In his right hand, he held the Sunbeam iron, its plastic housing cracked, the chord dangling and writhing like an eel.

“How much more can a man take?” Mr. Samuels said, heaving, filling the entire doorframe. “I couldn’t stand it any longer. You can see that, right? I just couldn’t take one more night. Coming home to that.”

Although I shook, and the words came out shaky, I told Mr. Samuels I understood.

We stood silently, staring at one another, until Mr. Samuels said, “Lotta noise in there.” He jerked his Kirk Douglas chin toward our house. “Don’t know how you stand it.”

I told him that’s why I was out here, talking to him. That I couldn’t take the noise. A line of sweat seeped from his forehead. As he reached to swipe it from his brow with the back of his shirt cuff, I saw blood. Mrs. Samuels’s blood. Drying. I flinched, thinking he’d brain me too with that Sunbeam. When he saw my reaction, he smiled. He said I needn’t worry. That I was a nice, quiet girl — that quiet girls were good girls. And that’s when I told Mr. Samuels I didn’t like loud noises either, and being yelled at, and he said, “It gets on your nerves. Cuts into you like shards of glass shot from a leaf blower.”

I had no idea what he meant by that but thought it poetic. So, I relaxed, as literature can do to you — calm your nerves. And so, I told Mr. Samuels, “You should be a poet. You got the most beautiful way of putting words together.”

Then I told him about the ladies, Mahjong, and Mom getting so loaded she missed the toilet seat and nearly shattered her coccyx last time they played when she got up to get more Stolichnaya from the freezer and pee. I told him I’d laughed at the wrong time again and how she thrashed me with a wooden coat hanger. And, of course, how she yelled at the table with the rest of them and then slapped me to the floor this time.

After I’d gone through all that, I asked him about the blood on his sleeve.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “Cut myself shaving,” which made no sense since there was so much of it, and it was like 5:30 pm, and I mean, who shaves at 5:30 pm?

That’s when Mr. Samuels got this wasteland look in his eyes, like he’d disengaged with the present, from all time, and embarked on a timeless voyage until I said, “Mr. Samuels-Mr. Samuels-Mr. Samuels!!” which brought him back.

“Sorry. I went away there,” he said. Then, after staring at me with lifeless eyes, he said, “Shouldn’t you be getting back for dinner?”

“I’m not going in there,” I said. “Like I told you. The noise.”

And then he thought a while longer, or took another mental trip, hard to tell, until he came around and focused in, and said with a smile cracking his face, “In for a penny, in for a pound,” and winked at me or had a tremor in his right eye. I couldn’t tell the difference there neither.

“What are you getting at, Mr. Samuels?”

He took me by the hand and led me in for a little tour of his kitchen, where Mrs. Samuels, or the former Mrs. Samuels, lay in her Picasso Cubist state beneath the fold-away wall ironing board.

And then I got it.

“Shut the fuck up,” I said.

Mr. Samuels looked at me sideways. “Now, where did a nice, polite little lady like you learn such sailor’s language?”

I told him I wasn’t a “nice, polite little lady” and that a person picks things up.

“One certainly does,” he said. “You don’t need to explain. I’d recommend you don’t use that “f” word any more than you have to. It doesn’t sound right, coming from a mouth as pretty as yours.”

I followed Mr. Samuels into the basement. There, among the darkness, the cobwebs, and the dust, behind a shelf of half-used paint cans lay stacks of Mrs. Samuels’s travel magazines, all the places she wouldn’t go now, all bundled up in crosses of twine. When we got to Mr. Samuels’s workbench, he reached behind it and pulled out a rusted crowbar.

“What are you going to do with that?” I asked Mr. Samuels.

“Make it quiet,” he said.

And after all the screaming around the Mahjong table, it did get quiet. Real quiet.

Well, about a month later, after all the hype died down, Mr. Samuels and I drove back down our street, or what once was our street. We’d been living in this abandoned service station with a dinosaur out front like we’d taken a trip in Mr. Peabody and Herman’s WABAC (or The Wormhole Activating and Bridging Automatic Computer) machine and were now back in prehistoric times. Oh, to be in a time before history.

Out behind the bays and pumps was a weatherbeaten two-room shack where the owner used to live. Mr. Samuels is a gentleman, so nothing funny happened. He slept on the couch with the horsehair springing up like an un-mowed burned-out wheat field in the front room, and I, in the bedroom behind that, rolled to the middle of the bowed mattress like I slept in a pig trough. We ate what we found in cans stacked in a 1950s Red Scare bomb shelter the owner had built for himself in case of nuclear apocalypse. I never understood thinking like this. Who’d want to live in a world of poison? Had to be all kinds of paranoid to build a bomb shelter but thank God he did. For our sake, I mean.

It was around seven o’clock at night, right around Get Smart time, with the laugh track when we rolled by our former houses real slow, like you could have strolled by us, not breathing hard. That’s when I noticed no lights on in Mr. Samuels’s house, or what used to be his house, and none in my own, either. Their front windows, without light, were a dark pair of unseeing eyes.

I asked Mr. Samuels what we’d do next. What would happen to us next? But he’d gotten so quiet during our month together that he barely said anything anymore, and he said nothing now. He looked across at me like he was making a calculation that didn’t add up. Then he looked into the gloom and said, “I don’t remember this road being so long.”

I reached out and turned on the radio, but nothing was on. No music like The Sonics’ “Cinderella” or Peter, Paul & Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Just talk radio. Some guy going on about how someday, if the earth became uninhabitable, we’d all move to the moon. Then I shut it off. Another faceless voice in my head made me nauseous. But I thought what the man had said was pretty interesting. And so, I broke the silence and told Mr. Samuels that the radioman had a good idea — going to the moon, seeing as Earth seemed uninhabitable right now.

“Seems so to me,” Mr. Samuels said. And I just nodded, looked up into an ocean of stars, and cried.

About the Author

Retired English teacher Jon Gluckman writes in a small southern New Jersey town outside Philadelphia, PA, USA. He has published work in Micro-Fiction Monday Magazine, 101 Words Weekly (x6), Mystery Magazine, Grim & Gilded, Mobius Boulevard, Frontier Tales (x2), The Best of Frontier Tales Anthology Vol. 15, Punk Noir Magazine (x2), Flash Frontier, Black Sheep Magazine Issue 21 and The Fifty & Up Writer Awards: The Table Issue #4 (2nd place finalist runner-up).