Huckleberries
This couple I know: they were high school sweethearts, the Bonnie and Clyde of the northwest San Fernando Valley, undetected.
Some moron had selected the “Chancellor” as the school mascot. A chancellor was some kind of British judge—a little faggot in a long white wig, was how the kids described it. We denied the “Chancellor” and unofficially adopted the Cowboy as mascot. Cowboys were what we were all about, that and the aerospace engineers who were colonizing our living space, taking down small ranches and putting up stucco housing developments. Their kids didn’t walk the roads barefoot in summer the way we did.
The town was changing. Excess warehouses were being taken over as studios for the porn industry. Eventually the town became the PORN CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. The high school cheerleaders made up slutty whore routines, and performed them at halftime, and the Vice-Principal, “Chrome-Dome,” McNellis, supported them. He would not allow a posse of evangelists to deny them their freedom of speech.
Enter this couple, Bonnie and Clyde: he was half man/ half dog, more wolf really, she half reptile/half bird, a plumed serpent in the big-breasted, leather-clad flesh. At least that’s the way they thought of themselves and we, their friends, came to think of them.
On prom night Clyde put his hairy head into the punch bowl. Bonnie slithered across the dessert table like an iguana, her tail flicking aside tortes and meringue. The fat kids grieved the lost pastries. They got on the floor and, under cover of dimness, shoved them into their drooling mouths.
After promming off, B & C smoked dope in the House of Dwarfs. Every one of them had lost their virginity by the age of fourteen. Their garage breathed in and out like a cartoon garage, their soundtrack crazy clarinet riffs.
I stood out in the road, waiting to be invited in. I was desperate for their acceptance, but the dwarfs had taken a dislike to me, I don’t know why. Everyone in school knew that I suffered from mental illness, but I didn’t think so. I couldn’t act any more sane than I did.
Then Dog Boy and Reptile Girl left the dwarfs to do what dwarfs do after events that are allegedly life-changing, and rode rusted-out dirt bikes into the Mojave to celebrate their Mayan heritage. When the sun came up, they set the bikes down in the cool, exhausted sand, knelt and worshipped the Rabbit in the Moon, then flaaagellaaated themselves like Spanish priests. They pounded their foreheads with chunks of jade with 400-million-year half-lives, royal jade, orange flecked with green. There were blood spots on their foreheads. The sheriff’s squad car roiled up dust in the distance. He wasn’t looking for them.
“I’ll be your Huckleberry,” said Dog Boy.
“I’ll be yours,” said Reptile Girl.
They were ready to move on. They did. They traveled far and wide, but returned for our fiftieth reunion. The rest of us had changed. Even the dwarfs had changed. But they hadn’t.
***
Third
1.
Adelaide of Burgundy became the patron saint of second marriages.
Her first husband, Lothair II, King of Italy, was poisoned. Her second husband called himself great, called himself holy.
Adelaide knew the truth but would not share it. She had taken a vow of silence.
Her husband blessed her for it. He was vexed with loudmouthed women. If it were up to him, he would have all female voice boxes removed at birth. What a different world it would be, he fantasized as he drifted off to sleep.
His silent and good wife, Adelaide was a woman to be emulated, he told his friends at table as their wives looked on with sour expressions.
2.
At age seventeen, I was a good deal younger than Adelaide, whom I’d heard was the saint of second marriages. I was a Paul Simon song: a rock, an island. I was Dostoyevsky’s underground man. I was Camus’s Stranger, who only needed his neighbors’ howls of execration to complete him.
All of this was nonsense to Adelaide.
I was a zombie, undone by a woman I’d met in New Orleans. I was a diamond with a flaw, as described by an Okie girlfriend who, until I told her otherwise, thought The Diary of Anne Frank was fiction.
None of this was relevant to Adelaide. She was a good deal older than me, the saint of second marriages.
I would be her third husband.
***
My Daughter’s Hair
Tens of thousands of data centers feed a spiraling multitude of web sites. Rows of servers spread over millions of square feet in warehouses which were once fields with pumpkins shining orange against black soil. Me and my brothers roamed the fields, and had pumpkin fights with the failed ones, trying to be careful not to smash any good ones, most of the time succeeding.
I still live in the old farmhouse, though there is no land around it, not even enough for a garden. The data centers run at max ‘round the clock. I hear the data buzz like bee hives, growl like packs of animals. I smell it burning. I get up in the middle of the night and drink orange juice, but I can’t get the taste of data out of my throat. Nobody thinks of people like me when they turn on their computers.
My daughter’s hair is brown kelp. It streams southward in the current. She stands on the ocean floor eighty feet down. She’s no scuba diver, no mermaid, but she’s invulnerable to drowning, one of the skills she developed growing up with a schizophrenic mother in the midst of data centers. She learned to adapt to being submerged, a massive weight on her shoulders.
Water is heavy. A mere gallon of water weighs over eight pounds, and there are millions of gallons of water pressing on her, yet she wears a serene expression. Her wisdom flows out, flows around her, drifts with the current and blesses people downstream. She is wiser than I will ever be, even if I live a century.
Work by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois appears in magazines worldwide. Nominated for numerous prizes, he was awarded the 2017 Booranga Centre (Australia) Fiction Prize. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and as a print edition. His poetry collection, THE ARREST OF MR. KISSY FACE, published in March 2019 by Pski’s Porch Publications, is available here. Visit his website to read more of his poetry and flash fiction.
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