Perfect White Ash

Our table radiates slate blue in the back of this too-dark bar and restaurant. My drink is phosphorescent green, tastes fruity, and has gone straight to my head. My wife sits across from me, but I’m barely aware of the other two couples. Except for my wife, none of them are my friends. They’re talking about horse farms, how everybody should have one.

“How about those baseball bat murders?” pipes a voice to my left. I look, attach the voice I hear to the body of Herman Schwieterman’s wife. I can’t see her face, but you can’t miss her pearls, a string of clam spit nacred so large each pearl must have come from a mollusk the size of Michigan. Which is where Herman is from. Herman with the swarthy face, the crude lust that dirties whatever he touches. I look at my drink, torn between wanting one more sip and fearing loss of functionality. “They say it’s the Governor,” Herman Schwieterman’s wife adds, answering the question before anyone asks, a gossip scoring points for being on insider with whoever ‘they’ are.

I don’t think the Governor did it, He’s just paid to distribute bats.

I think I say this, but realize I only thought it. My mouth is in a coma. I doublecheck –

everything else about me is, too. But my insight is sharp as a pocketknife – again, I recall once hearing that the Governor has an endorsement contract with the baseball bat company or something. But I don’t have control of my body sufficient to explain this to the others. My wife scoots her chair back, and a small spotlight illumines her face like a makeup mirror.

“I need to go to the bathroom.”

“I’ll escort you,” says Herman Schwieterman, quickly and intensely. Immediately, I

stand.

“That’s not necessary. I’ll do it.” I’m inserting myself between my wife and Schwieterman’s nefarious intentions. My mouth works, now. Everything else does, too, stirred by the defibrillator paddles of Schwieterman’s reptilian malice threatening my matrimonial rights. Part of me buried deep in the bottom of a barrel knows I unthinkingly swallowed Schwieterman’s axiom that my wife requires an escort to go to the bathroom. Life is riddled with people like Herman Schwieterman slipping notions in your drink when you aren’t looking.

I follow my wife, gingerly stepping down from the alcove, and proceed behind her through the restaurant, but the space around me turns almost pitch black. Have I had that much to drink? Or am I manifesting some organic condition that separates me from the sighted world? I force myself to be calm. I pick my way through the dark with my hands extended on either side for balance, heel to toe like a performer on a balance beam. I can’t see my wife in front of me, but I don’t sense her transmitting distress signals. Walking in the dark becomes easy. My kinetic field swishes as I pass between tables I cannot see.

As I reach the front, black fades to charcoal gray, then resolves in an ambient beige wash, fey as a 10-watt bulb. I push the large silver bar on the emergency exit door and open into a pleasant summer night. The air is humid. Moths circle the nebula of streetlights. Twenty or thirty men and women loiter, smoking, talking. There’s a low buzz, a party happening, or about to. It occurs to me that I’m behind a nightclub on a street in Belfast. Two or three women are in a line outside what must be the women’s restroom. My wife joins them.

“Mr. Wilson!”

I turn. It’s Beth, a former student of mine.

“Beth! How are you? What are you doing here? I like your hair!”

I do. It’s a pageboy cut framing her face which, I recall, is an emotional thermometer waxing and waning between thin and chubby, depending on whether her chronic stress presents as happy or sad. Tonight, her face leans toward chubby. Her hair is dyed dark brown, matching what used to be her natural color. When she smiles, she looks young for a moment.

“I’m glad to see you, too!” She inquires about my wife (she’s well, I don’t mention she’s peeing) and my job at the university (I’ve retired). For herself, Beth reports generic positivity, but too vaguely to pin down specifics without cross-examining her, which I won’t do because she seems impatient to complete these pleasantries and move on to something important.

“Have you heard about the baseball bat murders?”

I suppress my disappointment in Beth’s choice of conversation topics. It’s not her fault. The baseball bat murders seem to be on everyone’s mind.

“Sure. That is, I’ve heard that baseball bat murders are happening.”

The baseball bat murders have not been page one in the news cycle. They appear sporadically as a flash headline with a 10-second span that disappears under the deluge of reporting on war, pestilence, and Taylor Swift’s love life. The media doesn’t say who, where, when, or how, only what – that a body, again, has been found, brains bashed out with a baseball bat. Everyone is free to ignore the story or fill the gaps with speculation and imagined detail that conforms to one’s pre-existing predilections and conspiracy theories. News has become self-service, like gas stations and grocery stores.

“I just wanted to warn you about the Governor’s brother.”

“I didn’t know the Governor had a brother.”

I see surprise in her eyes, followed by rapid blinks, a kaleidoscope of emotion, a prism of compassion, feelings of superiority (student teaching the teacher) alternating with guilt. Beth brushes her bangs from her forehead, symbolically clearing her vision so I can see, too. Then she points.

My eyes follow Beth’s finger. I see the figure of a man at the corner of a hallway in some place that’s not this street. The hallway walls and floor are concrete. The man has red hair. He’s staring down at a pile of baseball bats carved out of perfect white ash. The man with red hair picks up one of the bats. He turns it this way and that, loving it with his eyes. Though I cannot see his eyes, I feel this to be true. I study the pile of bats on the floor because Beth shared, without speaking it, her suspicion. But there’s not a drop of blood. The bats are so beautifully white and clean, they almost breathe.

Apparently, my gaze is a siphon in reverse, because now I’m in the concrete room with the man with red hair. I can tell we’re underground. There are no windows, and the space feels heavy, a presence compressed by the weight of something above. Close up, I no longer see the redhaired man directly. When I try, an invisible field repels me, as if he and I are south poles of two bar magnets brought too close together. I can look at him with my peripheral vision, though, and I know he sees me seeing him. He poses in profile, allows me to study his glorious red hair and ivory white skin, his thin lips curled in a smile. He’s fetching, in a playful way, a charmer who’s both alarming and disarming. He’s magical. I suspect he steals something from me every moment I admire him. But I can’t see his eyes. He’s always looking away, even when he watches me. The place where eyes should be only suggest eyes. It’s possible they’re empty sockets.

Something brushes my left elbow. I turn. It’s my wife. Somehow, she followed me here. But she’s changed. When she stood in line for the bathroom, she was a solid five-foot-seven, around 125 pounds. Now, her body flutters like silver Christmas tinsel and she travels without touching the ground. She passes me, floats down the hallway on my left.

The red-haired man picks up one of the baseball bats by the handle. He flips and catches it at the opposite end. “Spring training, eh?” He promenades around me comically, flipping and catching the bat. “America’s pastime, is it not?”

I get it. They’re just baseball bats. For baseball. And these concrete underground hallways we’re in – why, it’s the tunnel to dressing rooms beneath a baseball stadium! Baseball bats are all they are, all they’ll ever be. Rumors circulating on the news about villainous baseball bats are just projections of our own internalized fears.

I release dread like an unholy spirit exorcised from my body. Take me out to the ballgame! I’m always uplifted when I pass through the gate and enter a baseball stadium, when I see the beautiful emerald lawn, the diamond of dirt, the four white bases and chalked limestone lines dividing fair from foul. Everybody feels this way, don’t they, how baseball is something good and true in se? Especially during spring training.

I hurry down the tunnel to catch up with my wife. I’m ready to empty out onto the field of dreams. But when my wife opens the door, we enter the rear of a sanctuary in a church. Except it’s the restaurant. The tables I swished by in the dark during our trek to find a restroom have transformed into pews. The fluorescent lights overhead emit a barren glare. And, like the tunnels under the baseball stadium, there are no windows.

The Governor is seated in the Pope’s chair, which is scooted close to edge of the dais. He’s wearing a baseball cap. He leans forward, addressing folks seated in the front of the nave like a librarian at story hour for four-year-olds. The Governor looks too young to drink, not even old enough to shave. His mouth moves, but I can’t hear what he says. As he earnestly tells his story, I study his features – brown hair, Anglo-Saxon face. The red-haired man in the tunnel is not the Governor’s brother, at least not by blood.

People in the pews are entranced. A husband and wife in the front row, mid-50s, each with a small pot belly, nod imperceptibly at the Governor like parents pleased by a good little boy. It strikes me that any parent is simply a four-year-old in the body of an adult. My wife slips around the Governor, steps down two stairs to the nave, and rushes to take a seat in the front row beside the pot-bellied couple. My wife has regained her human features – in fact, she is now clearer, more defined, and more human than anyone I’ve seen this evening. But her body has shrunk to the size of a doll’s. And she’s terrified.

At first, I think she’s just overly mortified that we interrupted public worship services with our incursion into the sanctuary. During the middle of the sermon, no less. She’s like that, very conscious of social faux pas, something drummed into her as a child. Then, I look at her again and see it’s the pot-bellied couple she fears. Why? They look like good people to me, the sort of folks who’d bring you a casserole if your mother died. Then I see the benevolence of the pot-bellied couple is a paper-thin husk. Pressing against that husk from behind is a great force, an ectoplasmic tsunami that wants to flood the church and wash everything away. I turn my eye back to the Governor. I still can’t make out his words, but I hear his tone. It’s deliberate, calm, soothing, like a hostage negotiator.

Slowly, the balloon of my gaze rises. I observe frescoes floating like clouds near the ceiling of the nave, frescoes depicting gods cocking baseball bats above their heads over victims who are supine on the ground, mouths agape, eyes frozen wide. Blood pours from their victims’ heads. Red spatter is everywhere. I zoom in closer to see/smell/touch, and discover the paint is still wet.

Spring Training.

I fast-walk through the sanctuary and down the steps into the nave. My wife signals me to sit with her, but I rush past. Telepathically I convey that she should follow me. I turn left, past ex-cheerleaders standing by an altar. Their bodies are mature, but still thin; their hair blonde, but dyed. Lines of cynicism stalk the corners of their eyes and mouth, sketching a hard-travelled road. They wait for a signal to prepare the sacrament. I wonder what they plan to slip in the drink.

I pick up my pace, hurrying toward the back of the church, mentally pulling my wife with me. Our only hope is that the dark alcove where we began the evening is in the chancel. We have to get there before they turn off the lights in the nave, because there won’t be time to pick our way through the dark. Even if I must hide in some crevice like a cockroach, even if I must sit beside Herman Schwieterman and clutch my life in my lap like a cheap change purse, we have to get back to our table before opening day.

MIKE WILSON’s work has appeared in magazines including The Pettigru Review, Fiction Southeast, Mud Season Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Deep South Magazine, Still: The Journal, Barely South Review, Anthology of Appalachian Writers Vol. X, and his book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic. He resides in Lexington, Kentucky.

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