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Tips of a duck's wings flutter in the open window, and, as if a pet intended only for him, the duck falls through the window and into the seat next to Mehmet. Its legs buckle under; it sits too low for his mother to see. Mehmet offers his straw. The duck is bright green with some purple-blue patches. It pulls its head away from Mehmet. Its chest is soaked with blood, which drops on the tan corduroy seat. Mehmet reaches for it. He wants to pick it up so it will not stain the seat. Suddenly, its wings cover the whole back seat, as bright as if the sun has just risen. Mehmet's mother screams a long time before she stops the car. His father hops off the hood, popping out the dent he has made. He reaches in the window, pulls out the duck by its neck.
Mehmet's mother has her hands over her eyes. She is outside, leaning against the car, swearing. Mehmet watches his father raise the duck, a green flash over his head. The bird, still light with life, treads air with its wings. Mehmet watches his father snap his arm and lower it, heavy and tired with the weight.
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Epilogue
by David Borofka
What am I to say about two brothers whose wives have argued, who are thus forced by their immediate loyalties not to speak to one another? Or the surgeon in love with the deftness of his hands, the choreography of his fingers, and who has been forced by illness to set his scalpel aside? Or the woman who refuses to act on her own desires because she is attracted to a married man, one who represents moral integrity and uprightness of heart? What can I say but repeat the usual clichés: that life is indeed a garden of pain, that men and women are born for trouble and heartache? That the world which seems to lie before us like a land so various, so beautiful, so new, et cetera, et cetera, is in reality a smoking landfill?
Let us say instead, that one hot June morning, the dew even at five-thirty already burned away, Len Farrington returns from his daily run sweaty and happy, illuminated by the sunrise and pleased by his own virtue, to find his brother with whom he has not spoken in a year and a half sitting on the bench to his front porch.
"Frog," his brother says, using a nickname he hasn't heard since his childhood, "how you can sweat like that, I'll never know."
His older brother Max, pudgy and uncomfortably Episcopalian in his shortsleeved black shirt and white collar, is the very image and picture of grief. His forehead is creased by anxiety, his eyes are clouded. Ever since he and Max stopped talking out of deference to Sylvia and Patrice, he has intuitively known that Max's life is nothing he would trade for. He knows that he and Sylvia are miserable, their lives circumscribed by her cycle of anti-depressants and sleeping pills. He knows that Max harbors resentment toward his parishioners for their savage and selfish complaints, their dull needs, springing from loneliness and dread. He once envied Max his sense of calling; he does so no longer.
"Sweat's a blessing," he says now, using his brother's language. He chooses to ignore the recent history that hangs between them. Instead he focuses on the bright front of his white house, the gleam of newly painted black shutters. "After a run, I've drained all the poisons out of my soul. No offense."
His brother visibly winces at the word "soul," as if he doesn't possess the qualifications for its utterance. Fuck him, Len thinks. Fuck him and his black shirts of depression, his white collar of propriety Anger radiates through his
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whole body like heat. He cannot know that Max only winces whenever the language of his trade reminds him of his own shortcomings. He cannot know that even now Max is thinking that Leonard Farrington, independent insurance agent representing all lines of life, homeowner, and auto, the Frog Man of their childhood now thirty years in the past, so named for his refusal to touch their slimy green bodies, his general refusal to dirty himself, would have made the better priest.
"Maybe I shouldn't be here," Max says, looking to the pale, flat sky, his round face gone gray in dawn's twilight. "But I've needed to tell someone."
"Tell who what?"
It is here that Max buries his head, with its few pale threads of sandy-colored hair, into his hands, groaning from a well of despair. "I'm in love." This last syllable of misery still hangs in the rising heat of the morning when Patrice steps outside onto the porch for the morning paper.
"Love," she sniffs, her eyes still smudged by last night's mascara, "the most highly overrated thing on God's green earth." She pulls her flowered house coat more tightly around herself, picks up the paper, and snaps free the rubber band with at whack that echoes along the quiet street like pistol fire. She steps inside the house again, leaving in her wake nothing, not a word, not a greeting, not a single acknowledgment of her brother-in-law.
"Maybe I shouldn't be here," Max says again. "It was a bad idea."
"No, no, you're here. After all this time. And you're in. . . ." Len sighs. "Maxie, you're forty-three years old."
"And in love. Again. Fat and stupid and terminal with love."
"And married. Still."
"Yes."
"And Sylvia."
"I'm not in love with Sylvia."
He says this with such utter seriousness, such Episcopalian gravity, such obvious adolescent misery mingled with joy that Lennie can't help but laugh. If Max knew how pitiful he looked, how pleased with himself, he would be mortified. This is not the first time that Maxie, resonant with rectitude, has listened to the dictates of his hormones rather than the doctrine of his church. He has, after all, known his share of organists and secretaries, the bored and the lonely. But now, this affair of his heart has left him so fragile that this morning he was nearly driven to his knees by the sight of a young woman riding in the bed of a pickup truck. In the glossy heft of her auburn hair he could see, he was sure, all the promises of eternal life. In matters of yearning, he has the emotional stability of a fourteen-year-old.
"So," Len finally asks, "who is it?"
"No one you know. A woman named Virginia."
"You want to come in?" Len asks.
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Max shakes his head. A failed counseling partnership has left Patrice and Sylviathe sisters-in-law, registered marriage-family therapistsembittered, and their anger extends to their respective families. Office furniture now decorates both houses. Three feet from Len and Patrice's front door, a cherry wood rolltop stands accusingly. A couch, upholstered in industrial grade fabric, faces Max's fireplace.
"No," he says, "I better not."
"Come on." Len pulls his brother's arm. "Patrice won't mind. Have some breakfast."
"No." Max's face brightens for a moment. "Let me buy you breakfast." He names the coffee shop on the corner "A brother can buy his brother breakfast, right?"
Doubtful now, Len checks his black runner's watch. "I've got an eightthirty meeting." He checks the watch again. "Oh hell, I'll cancel the meeting. But I've got to shower."
"I'll get us a table. Eggs sunny side up, hash browns, rye toast?"
Len shakes his head. His brother has named his breakfast of the past, as if it had come from a time capsule. "Oatmeal. Half a grapefruit."
"That's not a"
Len raises a hand before Max can go further. "My cholesterol's at 215, my blood pressure's a little high. I'm forty-one years old, and I'm trying not to fall apart. You get to do the funerals, but I have to write the checks."
"Okay, oatmeal. Half a grapefruit. How about some prune juice? Maybe some Geritol? A Maalox and Metamucil shake? A hair shirt to every fifth unhappy customer"
"Get out of here. I'll meet you." He steps through the doorway into darkness.
After the door closes, Max waits for just a minute on the front porch. The sky is cloudless, a dome shaded from black to azure to aquamarine. Bands of pink and red outline the mountains in the east. By noon it will be nearly white, a furnace. This isn't an easy land to live in, he thinks, putting on sunglasses against the dawn.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
Patrice stands in front of the bathroom mirror, outlining her lips. She wears one towel like a turban, another as a
wrap. The thought strikes Len that the probability of him standing his brother up could be measured in the thickness of terry cloth and gym shorts. When he turns the tap for his shower, Patrice also turns: "Do you mind not doing that while I'm here?" she asks. "It's steamy enough as it is."
So he goes to the shower built into one corner of the garage and curses the cold cement under his feet. The water begins hot then peters out to lukewarm while he is mid-shampoo. Patrice, he thinks, wiping soap from his eyes. God-
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dammit. Goddammit to hell. Ever since the collapse of their office and her estrangement from Sylvia, Patrice has been a different person. She took a state job, issuing counseling and prenatal care information to teenagers who look at her with bemused and barely tolerant expressions. She hates them. They remind her too clearly of how fine the line is between success and failure. Patrice now speaks of retirement as her career objective; her résumé has become a ticket to old age. As the cold water drains from his legs, Len once again feels a surge of anger that his money must be used to pay loans for a business that no longer exists. He has an urge to chop the rolltop desk into kindling.
She is dressing when, irked and shivering, Len enters their bedroom. From behind he can discern only the barest outline of the woman he married seventeen years ago. He imagines that he hears his son and daughter begin to stir They are the children that he and Patrice never bothered to conceive except as jokes, images of misfortune they've avoided. When the toilet clogs they blame it on the girl, the second child they never had. Could real children have made life worse than this? he wonders. Or has the joke been on them?
His life could be worse. His work is routine, his material needs are met. His neighbors are decent and, in a pinch, generous. Although abstracted and unsatisfied, his wife says she loves him. But there are those unpredictable moments when a voice breathes the word "Tahiti" into his ear, when he imagines himself as Gauguin. Why, he wonders for the umpteenth time, does his brother the priest seem to understand matters of sex and desire better than he does?
In such a mood he watches as Patrice packs her brassiere.
"Don't watch," she says. "It ain't pretty." She shrugs into a blouse, steps into a jumper, choosing clothes as cover for her multitude of sins.
"So how is Max?" she adds. "And how is the poor bastard's wife?"
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
By chance Max meets a parishioner in the parking lot of Gaylord's. Dr Klinefelter has been retired for seven years, ever since he diagnosed himself as suffering from multiple sclerosis. The disease has worked quickly. He walks now with twin canes in a jerking, spasmodic hitch-hop gait. His hands resemble talons, his mouth twitches between words. Dr. Klinefelter has attended St. James's, Max's parish, for thirty yearssince long before Max was on the sceneand Max measures his Sundays by Klinefelter's lurchings as if the condition of the older man's debility were a barometer of his own unrest. He counts the doctor's illness as one complaint that is entirely verifiable, distinguishing him in this regard from the dozens of other complaints he so often hears.
"Don't eat the hash," the doctor grunts as he settles himself into the booth by the door. It's an old jokethey first met when Max had food poisoning. "Try the waffle," the doctor advises. "Safer."
"The waffle it is."
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The doctor places his hand on Max's arm. "I have a riddle for you, Father. How can Paul consider the Law to be an agent of death, when it is by the Law that sin is made known and the Grace of God is made both necessary and manifest? Is the Law then not an agent of life by virtue of its role as the causation of Grace?"
Max smiles. "You're more argument than I can handle."
He knows that Klinefelter will be unsatisfied without an answer, but Max has no intention of debating Paul's Letter to the Romans. Max gently refuses the doctor's offer to share his booth. Klinefelter is widowed and childless, lonely as well as crippled. Any other morning, Max would be glad to eat breakfast with him. His mind is as sharp as any scalpel, and he is a devoted, albeit untrained, student of theology.
"You be good, Father Farrington," the doctor says, "or I'll open you up." He makes a slicing motion with his shaking right hand.
"Goodness," Max says, fully aware of all the attendant ironies, "is a vocational risk."
Actually, Max's conscience has been buried for months. He has not allowed himself to think about the ramifications for himself or for Sylvia; he is still thinking only of his desire rather than its consequences.
Max goes to the bathroom to wash his hands. In the one stall another man is on his knees. He is throwing up in great shuddering heaves.
"Are you all right?" Max calls. "Is there something I can do?"
"No, no," the other man sings outcheerfully, Max thinksbefore another surge hits him. "I need to get to work anyway."
Leaving this unexplained, the other man rises and throws the bolt on the stall door. He holds the metal frame as if to steady himself. Flecks of vomit dot his shirt, his sport coat looks slept in, and the whites of his eyes have turned muddy as swamp water. He exudes the odor of alcoholic decay.
"You're okay?" Max says. He is more than willing to play the part of the Good Samaritan.
"Tip top," the other man says. "Absolutely."
He aims himself for the sinks, and Max moves out of his way.
"If you're sure," Max says.
"Of course. Absolutely. Sorry you had to witness that." He buries his head in the sink and opens the valve wide. Spray jets everywhere.
"It's quite all right," Max hears himself say.
This courtly graciousness has become a little strange, and he edges out of the bathroom, flagging down a waitress before he sinks into his own booth. He gives his brother's meager order as well as his own, then stops the girl with one hand on her arm. "Do you know that man?" He tilts his head toward the bathroom door from which the other man has just now emerged, his hair sticking up in wet, unruly spikes.
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The girl wrinkles her nose. "All this week, he comes in at five. We draw straws." Her face darkens. "He's never a problem though," she says. "He didn't ask you for money, did he?"
"No."
"'Cause if he asked you for money, we'd ask him to leave, but if he didn't ask you for money, then we generally let them stay. Unless the smell gets too bad or something, or if they start making dirty jokes to old women or kids."
"I just wondered."
He sits down to wait for Len. His brother has surprised him. While he knows there is no love lost between Sylvia and Patrice, he expected greater shock from Lennie, his puritan brother. Moral outrage. Judgment. Castigation.
As if to solve his problem, the sun frees itself fully from the rim of mountains to the east, and its full potency pours through the plate glass windows next to the booths. The harsh light has the force of a fist, and Max turns his head away. So this is the answer, this stark exposure. Max turns back toward the glare and thinks, Give me your worst, go ahead, until the waitresses come by, lowering blinds, pivoting louvres.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
As it happens, Len is not the first to meet Max. Virginia has beaten him to it. She called his home only to hear Sylvia's sleep-thick, pill-disfigured voice; she disguised her own hoping to sound like an elderly church member, but Sylvia evidently doesn't care. She doesn't know where her husband is, he could be anywhere, she says. It is obvious that she only wants this bothersome caller to go away. She called St. James's and listened to a recorded message announcing the times of worship. Then she called the number just above Max's in the phone book, his brother's, a long shot at best but there it was: Patrice, much more cheerful and accommodating than Sylvia, told her about Gaylord's.