Miniature Wife : And Other Stories (9781101602041) Read online

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  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi–110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa), Rosebank Office Park, 181 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parktown North 2193, South Africa • Penguin China, B7 Jiaming Center, 27 East Third Ring Road North, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100020, China

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2013 by Manuel Gonzales

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Gonzales, Manuel, date.

  The miniature wife and other stories / Manuel Gonzales.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-101-60204-1

  I. Title.

  PS3607.O56227M56 2013 2012026167

  813'.6—dc23

  Acknowledgment is made to the publications in which these stories first appeared: “Juan Refugio Rocha: A Meritorious Life” in McSweeney’s; “Keith, Stebbins, Hoardwood & Niles: An Illustrated History of Meritorious Lives” in The American Journal of Print; “Cash to a Killing” on esquire.com; “The Disappearance of the Sebali Tribe” in Open City; “Pilot, Co-Pilot, Writer” in One Story Magazine and anthologized in Flight Patterns: A Century of Stories About Flying (edited by Dorothy Spears. New York: Open City Books, 2009); “The Artist’s Voice: Hearing Is Believing” in Fence and anthologized in A Best of Fence: The First 9 Years, Volume 2, Fiction & Nonfiction (edited by Rebecca Wolff. Albany: Fence Books, 2009); “William Corbin: A Meritorious Life” in The Lifted Brow.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Sharon

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Pilot, Copilot, Writer

  The Miniature Wife

  William Corbin: A Meritorious Life

  The Sounds of Early Morning

  The Artist’s Voice

  Henry Richard Niles: A Meritorious Life

  Cash to a Killing

  Harold Withy Keith: A Meritorious Life

  The Animal House

  All of Me

  Life on Capra II

  Juan Refugio Rocha: A Meritorious Life

  The Disappearance of the Sebali Tribe

  One-Horned & Wild-Eyed

  “Wolf!”

  Farewell, Africa

  Juan Manuel Gonzales: A Meritorious Life

  Escape from the Mall

  Acknowledgments

  “Things fall apart.”

  —W. B. YEATS

  Pilot, Copilot, Writer

  I.

  We have been circling the city now at an altitude of between seven thousand and ten thousand feet for, according to our best estimates, around twenty years.

  I once asked the Pilot—this was early into the hijacking, maybe a week—how we were doing in terms of gasoline and how he planned to refuel, but he did not tell me. He laughed and patted me on the shoulder as if we were good friends together on a road trip and I had just asked him how we were going to get there without a map. Back in the cabin, I asked a man who was an engineer if he knew how we had managed to stay aloft for so long, and he gave me a complex explanation, most of which I did not understand, centered around a rumored “perpetual oil.”

  “Is there such a thing?” I asked him. “Perpetual oil?”

  “Well,” he said. “I’m not sure that there isn’t.”

  The Pilot called my name over the intercom a number of times before I realized it was me he was calling for. By the time I figured it out, the other passengers were leaning into the aisle and stretching over their seats to see who it was being summoned. I stood up and a low murmuring passed through the cabin. I suppose everyone assumed I was being called to be executed, since the hijacking had just happened a day or two before and we hadn’t been told anything else by the hijacker since. There had been speculation about demands, about actions, about executions, but nobody knew, really, what was going to happen. I didn’t blame the others for thinking that I had been called in to be the first casualty, as I had assumed the same. But why me instead of the man in front of me or the woman across the aisle or anyone else on board, one of the flight attendants maybe? A woman grabbed my arm as I walked toward the front of the plane and shook her head, entreating me with her eyes not to go, to sit back down, but I didn’t want to make the Pilot mad, so I pulled myself free and made my way.

  When I knocked on the Pilot’s door, I heard his voice say in a singsong way, “Come in.” He turned to look at me as I entered his cabin. “Sit, sit,” he said, gesturing to the seat next to him, the copilot’s seat.

  I sat and he smiled and, without looking at me, said, “So you are the writer.”

  Unsure of what else to say, I said, “Yes. That’s me.”

  “My name is Josiah,” he said. “Josiah Jackson.” He handed me a pad of paper and a pen. “Write that down,” he said.

  I wrote on the top of the sheet of paper Josiah. And then, for good measure, underneath that, I wrote Josiah Jackson. I tore the sheet off the pad and gave it to him for his inspection.

  He laughed as if I had made a very good joke, and then he said, “You are no less than what I had expected you to be.”

  We sat next to each other in silence for a moment, then two moments, until finally he said, “Okay. You can go now.”

  Feeling a certain amount of relief knowing that I wasn’t to be executed and feeling confident in having made him, for whatever reason, laugh, I asked him why he had hijacked the plane and why we were still circling Dallas. At this he gave me a stern and serious look. “I do not usually answer questions, but since it is you: We are circling because I only know how to fly to the left.” He looked at me and then laughed again, and said, “No, no. I’m only kidding.” Then he turned back to look at the sky, which was now growing dark, and said no more.

  The plane was full. The overhead compartments were full, too. The woman next to me had somehow managed to board the plane with more carry-on items than are normally allowed, but as she and I had been the last passengers to board, she was forced to cram as much as possible under the seat, and then, noticing that I had not carried much with me onto the plane, she asked if she could place just one or two items under the seat in front of me.

  “Just this small bag and this other smal
l bag,” she said. “You can just kick them out of the way, if you want. They’re nothing but dirty clothes.”

  I told her I didn’t mind, but in fact I minded a little, and after we had taken off and the seat-belt light was turned off and she left for the restroom, I did kick one of the bags, but it wasn’t filled with clothes and I heard, or felt, something break. I was waiting, after she came back to her seat, for the right time to tell her that I had accidentally broken whatever it was that had been in her bag, but then the hijack happened and nobody thought about anything like their bags or their connecting flights for a long time, and then, as she was an older woman who became even older as the years passed by, she eventually forgot about almost everything else and passed away in her sleep before I was ever able to apologize.

  For a while, we all fought over the window seats because no one believed me when I said that we weren’t going anywhere, that we were merely circling and circling over the same city. I was pulled out of my seat and pushed aside, and even though I didn’t care to look out the window anymore, knowing that it would be the same view again and again, I didn’t like being jerked away like that, and I grabbed the guy who had pushed me by his collar and pulled him roughly back, but he was lighter than I expected him to be and the both of us fell into a pregnant woman, who pushed into another passenger, and then we all started fighting. After a while, we were pulled apart by the Pilot, who said, “I have to fly the plane, and I can’t keep coming out here like this to babysit you. So sit down and shut up.”

  Afterward, no one cared to look out of the windows but me and a few others, and as the days and weeks and months passed, these people, too, stopped looking, pulled down their window shades, turned their heads to look anywhere else but outside at the Dallas skyline, because, they said, their necks hurt and the sight of Reunion Tower only made them depressed.

  “Nobody move” is what he yelled. “This is a holdup!” Then he began to laugh at what he thought was a clever and tension-breaking joke. Since he was dressed as a pilot and had a soft Southern accent, we laughed, too. But then, it did turn out to be a holdup of sorts.

  We weren’t sure for a long time what had happened to the other pilots, the real pilots. Had they been abducted on their way through the airport? Were they now bound and gagged and locked in a broom closet, or possibly murdered? It wasn’t difficult, despite his laughter and his slight paunch, to picture our Pilot engaging in such activities. But how had our Pilot managed to maneuver through security? How did he fool the flight attendants, who surely should have known he wasn’t a real pilot?

  Only later did we find out, from one of the flight attendants, that he was the real pilot. That he had been flying for ten years. That she had flown with him a number of times. But that no one knew what had happened to the copilot.

  At one point, looking out the window at the city below—the streets and the highways and the trees and buildings—I saw a long freight train moving slowly along the tracks that run parallel to Highway 635, and I was reminded of a story I had written in which a man had tried to build a scale model of nineteenth-century America and the trains that crossed it. He lived underground, as did a number of other people in this story, and so had no concept of how large exactly the continent was. Looking out the window at this height made me realize that such a model was now laid out before me, and I understood that I, too, had no concept of how large exactly the continent was. That the scope of my imagination was shown to be so much smaller in scale and weight than the continent that I had been trying to imagine through the eyes of a man who had never seen it before depressed me, and so I closed my window shade for the first time and leaned my head back against the seat and tried to sleep.

  Sometimes I will go for weeks, months, even, without looking at myself in the bathroom mirror. I know the bathroom well enough to be able to perform whatever human functions I need to perform with my eyes closed. Then, after a long enough time has passed, I will suddenly open my eyes and stare directly into my own face in the mirror, hoping the sight of age will shock me into feeling some kind of emotion, sadness or anger or humility, but I have decided that anything besides boredom and thirst and a dull, physical ache is beyond the reach of airplane passengers.

  I have tried to write other things besides this since the plane was hijacked. The Pilot gave me pen and paper, and I at first expected that he expected me to chronicle the hijacking. I wrote a few pages—descriptions, mainly: the color of the woman’s hair next to me, the stale, cold air of the cabin, etc., etc.—and showed them to him, but then he didn’t want them, said he didn’t have time to read them. “Don’t you know I’m busy?” he said, laughing, but also, or so it seemed, peeved that I had bothered him. I’ve never been comfortable with rejection of this sort, and, for the first year or so, his words kept me from writing anything down at all. Then, slowly, I began to take notes for a story and then notes for a novel and then notes for another novel and another story, but all they have been are notes.

  We were given permission to use our cell phones. The Pilot said he didn’t care about signals or about whom we called. Everything he said, he said with a laugh, though none of us could ever tell what he thought was so funny. We called our loved ones. I called my wife. I told her we had been hijacked. She knew, she said, because it was all over the evening news. We said those things we were supposed to say, but I felt that her heart wasn’t in it, that maybe she was distracted by the news story on the television. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it, either. A baby had been crying for some time in the row or two rows behind me. We, my wife and I, didn’t have kids and she wasn’t pregnant and we had only been married for a short while, so I had a hard time feeling as bad for myself as for the old man who was missing his wife’s birthday, who then missed—as time went on—their fortieth anniversary, and then her funeral; or the man whose pregnant wife was on board with us (the one I pushed down by accident), whose unborn child he might never see. But then, they (the old man, the pregnant wife) never appeared to feel too sad about it all, either. Mostly, once I hung up with my wife, I felt worn out by the need to shout so much over the poor reception, and twice our phones hung up by mistake—lost signal, etc.—and each time involved a series of callbacks and messages until we were finally able to reconnect. Looking around the cabin at the other passengers as they also hung up with their loved ones, I had the feeling that they had been worn out, too. No one much used their cell phones after those first few days, and eventually all of the batteries died out, anyway.

  My eyes adjusted so completely to looking at the city from high up that when I imagined myself on the ground, walking through the downtown area, or driving from north Dallas to Plano or Grapevine, I could not figure out how I would navigate from such a narrow perspective. How would I know my way around? How would I avoid being run over by a car or hit by a trailer truck?

  As the years passed, I learned to pick out details, as if I were a hawk or an owl. I got to where I could see my parents’ house, my wife’s mother’s house, the church where my wife remarried; not just see the general area where they should have been, but see them, in detail. Sometimes I will see a little boy or girl whose ball has bounced into the street run out after it unaware of the teenager speeding around the corner, or some situation like this, and the first couple of times I saw this, I yelled at the child (or dog or blind old man) to watch out, but I soon realized how foolish I sounded, how I startled the other passengers with my yelling, and so I stopped.

  A young man in first class—a business executive or some such, I suppose—began a regimen of walking and stretching and worked very hard to convince everyone else on the plane to follow suit.

  “This poor excuse for food,” he complained, “will only make us sick and flabby.”

  He said, about our muscles, “Use them or lose them, people.”

  He would walk down the aisle and pat random bellies, or he would jog down the aisle, bouncing on his toes, hi
s arms up around his face as if he were preparing for a boxing match. A few of the passengers joined him. Calisthenics, jumping jacks, yoga stretches. Most of us, though, sat in our seats and watched him bounce up and down, his face sickly and pale and sweaty. It turned out that he wasn’t eating the food at all, and it was really no surprise, in hindsight, that he was the first to go. After that, the exercise regimens came to an end.

  The phone in front of my seat rang once. It was my mother. I do not know how she knew how to contact me on the plane. Other phones rang at other seats, too, and I suppose it is possible that the airline gave these callers our numbers. She sounded the same on the phone as she had when I had last spoken with her, some seven or eight years before, but I knew that she must have looked much older than I remembered, and as we spoke, I closed my eyes and tried to add wrinkles and creases to her face, gray hairs to her scalp, liver spots to the back of the hand that held the phone.

  She told me about my father, his heart attack. She told me that she had gone to my wife’s second wedding, and that it was a nice, small affair. She asked me about what we had been eating, and, so she wouldn’t worry, I did not mention the weight I had lost, or the flavorless liquid the Pilot had us drink. She asked if I had met anyone on the plane, a nice woman, perhaps, someone, anyone to keep me from feeling lonely. So she wouldn’t worry, I told her about the pregnant woman, who had not been pregnant now for quite some time, but I was embarrassed talking about it on the phone since I knew that she could hear me saying these things to my mother even though both of us knew nothing had ever happened between the two of us except for one night, during a heavy storm, when the cabin lights blew out and she grabbed my hand out of fright. I tried talking to her once or twice after that night, but her son, who had grown into a rather big boy at seven years old, locked me in the bathroom when his mother wasn’t looking and threatened to keep me locked in there unless I promised to leave his mother alone.