Happiness Is a Chemical in the Brain: Stories (23 page)

NOW IT IS HAPPENING too quickly, though Marie can think of no way to slow it down: when she steps to the pile, the boss hands her the drip can as if he were a squire armoring his knight. All she can think of are the Navajos who’d lived at the center of the flame’s blue core, saying,
We are alive, so we’ll just stay here for a while
. As they told the story in the film of how the fire roared across their backs, the men broke into shivers. Or gagged on their words, sobbing in silence. Never before had Marie seen such big men in tears.

MARIE CHECKS the bottom of her boots, killing time. She sets down the drip can so she can tie her bandanna over her mouth like an old-time thief. When she closes her eyes, she sees herself lying on her back as the fire passes over, her eyelids burning like a piece of film stuck in a projector. Her glasses exploding like windows in an abandoned burning shed. Then she opens her eyes, picks up the drip can again, and peers down into its pure dark. And that’s all the stalling she can do without embarrassing herself, so at last she touches her Zippo to the wick that sticks from the drip can’s spout. Rolls the flint wheel with her thumb.
Snick
. The wick doesn’t catch.
Snick snick.
And then it does.

THRUSTING HER RIGHT ARM awkwardly backward at a diagonal to her body, she lets the drips fall and stands there for one split second while the branches start crackling like gunshots. No going back now, everything back of her is burning. And the pile in front of her looks like a tunnel
whose way out is farther in
. She can hear the flames rising, the green wood moaning, while the slash burners stare at her with doubt and hope scribbled in the twisting shapes of their red lips—

AND AT LAST Marie is left with no choice but to run.

On Wednesday afternoons, the Daughters of the British Empire hold their High Tea at Doctor Doodle’s Donut Den, whose regular business hours run from five a.m. till noon. They throw some chintz over the tables and stick a silk flower in a jelly jar on top of each, a transformation that somehow lets them feel okay about charging big bucks for sandwiches the size of bottle caps. The proceeds they send back to England, where my mother is originally from, back to some charity for war orphans. I don’t know why it took so long to dawn on me which war we were talking about.

“Just because they’re elderly doesn’t mean they don’t still need our help,” my mother huffs. She’s got the long skirts, the dust cap, she’s even got the rolling pin. So it’s pretty much a knee-jerk reflex when I put up my hands to fend her off: “Hey, just so they didn’t still have their hearts set on adoption is all,” I say.

These Wednesdays always throw a segment of Doctor Doodle’s regular clientele for a loop, namely the rough trade who have a hard time keeping their a.m. and their p.m. straight. They come stumbling in from their caves hollowed out in the blackberry brambles by the bay; they come because Doctor Doodle’s is the only place in town that still offers bottomless cups of coffee. “I can’t turn my back on the people,” says Doctor Doodle, and I say, “That’s why you’ll never be a rich man, Doctor D”—this was before I knew about the high-quality weed that he had growing somewhere in the state forest.

But don’t go blabbing about this, because the news would break the Daughters of the British Empire’s hearts. Or the Doobies, as I like to call them, though my mother has asked me to desist. Doctor D they call “a good boy” whenever they’re called on to speak charitably of him, and they have to speak charitably since he’s letting them use his shop for free.

Because she lives with Mum, my sister Louisa gets drafted for High Tea duty, though Louisa doesn’t go in for any of that
Upstairs, Downstairs
dress-up crap. For Louisa, High Tea is strictly an occasion for navy blue skimmers and her Home Shopping Network earrings, a pair of which she’s got to match each one of her good dresses. I think she figures that being retarded is enough of a strain: she doesn’t want to have to add worrying about looking weird on top.

The Doobies like to station her at the door, because my sister is surprisingly a Nazi when it comes to body odor and sobriety. That’s what happens when you spend twenty years in special ed: you come out an enforcer for the social contract. My sister is the only person I’ve ever met who knows the correct usage of a cocktail fork.

When the bramble-sleepers first presented themselves, the Doobies took a hard line against letting High Tea be overrun by homeless men, though Doctor Doodle countered by saying that he wouldn’t have loaned them his shop if he’d known about their “petty-boojwazh Anglo frou-frou mercantilistic trip.” So they’ve reached an admission policy by group consensus: before four o’clock, Louisa will tell everyone that there’s no coffee, only tea, and furthermore they will have to cough up three dollars for the entire pot.

But after four o’clock, when whatever’s left is only headed for the trash, they throw the door open, come-one come-all. Stinky Tea, that’s what I call this last hour of Wednesday afternoon, which is when I’ll also drop in to cop some free leftover scones. A half dozen widows will still be sitting there, eating cucumber sandwiches and draining the last of the Earl Grey from their lukewarm pots, and — though it’s probably just a fluke — some of them will even have their pinkies sticking out.

“Four o’clock,” Louisa’ll announce from her post by the door when the big hand on her watch comes round. And to the outside world she’ll holler, “Okay, you guys can come on in for Stinky Tea!”

DOCTOR DOODLE was born Leonard Katzenberg, but that’s a hubcap that dropped off a long ways back. Dimly I remember him as a tall kid in the marching band, playing John Philip Souza on his clarinet. But now the Doobies are the only people left in town who still call Doctor Doodle “Leonard,” as in: “Leonard’s a good boy”—this my mother speaking—“but the way he looks frightens people off.” When I observe that the donut business seems to be humming along at a brisk enough clip, she says, “Well, people would buy donuts from Charles Manson if he had any crullers left at ten a.m.”

At such junctures, I resist leaping to Doctor D’s defense. I’m not exactly eager to have my mother find out that for the past two months I have been doing the deed with Doctor D. We need not go into the pinball game I was playing with him at King Arthur’s Reef, where in the frenzy of my being up three hundred thousand points I spilled a Black Russian on the machine and lapped it all up before any of it ran off the edge, the whole time keeping my ball in play.

“Nice tongue,” he said.

Black and antigravitational, the Doctor’s hair can usually be found stuffed into the crochet job that he prefers to a hairnet, a tam that rides his head like some giant rainbow-colored mushroom. He is the kind of stunningly agile fat guy who moves as if his body were fashioned out of space-age gel, plus he has these very tiny feet I found myself nose to toe with later that night when he helped me climb aboard his boat.

It is, in fact, a boat I sold him, a Chris-Craft cruiser from the thirties, which Doctor Doodle has named
The Elsie
. Before he bought it, the guys in the shop stripped and varnished the deck so the mahogany’s highlights gleamed; the hull below the waterline they painted a bright shade of red. Then to push the envelope they dropped in a Chevy inboard big enough to have powered a Cadillac, which when taken up to speed made the boat shimmy like it might splinter into matchsticks. And when it didn’t, the guys began to bark and crow in their native tongue, which employs various animal noises coupled with a lot of homoerotic body contact.

This is one of the perks of working in the boat shop: on sunny days, which don’t come often in these parts, we’ll take turns test-driving whatever’s on the lot. Another perk is maybe the thrill of seeing guys like Doctor Doodle — who in high school sometimes had to suffer the humiliation of having a yarmulke bobby-pinned to his frizzy scalp — now seeing these boys peel five thousand dollars from their wads of crumpled twenties. We don’t call it money laundering — we just call it selling boats. Because we are rooting for them, you understand, these guys who trade at the fringes of the outlaw realms, who stuff themselves into the cabins of boats too small for anyone with all his marbles to consider living on. And we forgive their haphazard personal hygiene because we know they have to shower in the pay stall at the marina’s public john, where they never have enough quarters, these guys who own nothing that takes up space, who wear one pair of sweatpants until the ass wears out and even then they’ll get by for months with safety pins dangling back there like a bunch of grapes.

Louisa was with me that night at King Artie’s Reef, so it was the two of us walking beside him as he pushed his old Schwinn down the dirt road that runs atop the levee. You get a cheaper moorage here behind the sewage treatment plant, the sewage a moot concern because the mudflats bordering this whole town stink at all but the highest tides.

“Take us for a ride,” my sister commanded. So the Doctor untied the mooring ropes and in no time had us lumbering along at the boat’s top speed, into Puget Sound’s open water,
The Elsie
chattering so hard I could feel my molars working loose. The lights from the houses blurred into streaks that jerked as the hull went
fwop fwop fwop
. The cabin swayed and the windows threatened to fly off — the transom groaning, the plywood popping — until Doctor Doodle eased up behind the island that is Indian land. He let us drift there while he disappeared into the cabin and eventually rematerialized with a Mason jar full of dark fluid. Homemade blackberry brandy, he said, warning us to strain the seeds by sipping through our teeth.