Basic Division

by Keith Cagney

“Penny Pendleton was a whore!” The fat woman collapsed without an attempt at grace, gripping a man she had barely met as he rolled on the floor in a daze.

Dom chuckled. Some revelation. He shifted in his seat for a better view, rapping a flimsy program on his bouncing knee. Bree was staring too intently to reprimand him. None of the other believers seemed to notice. The circle didn’t utter a breath, sneaker-dust smoke abated in the beams of caged lights above them. Even the bleachers, folded the entire night, looked as if they were huddled even closer to the walls from pure shock. Looking around him, Dom couldn’t tell if this was the real thing, but he supposed it was the closest he’d ever get to a séance at the Djibo County Rec Center. Big-rig began to wail, her bouffant doing a humble percussion to the pulse of her cellulite. Her ex-husband’s tirade frothed at the medium’s lips, still crumpled at half-court, “She wasn’t half the woman you were! I always regretted leaving, always!”

Up front she fell into tears, exclaiming, “Oh, God, I knew you’d made a mistake.” A man in high socks and jean shorts put his arm on her shoulder and led her away, wiping Animal Crackers from his tee shirt with dignity. “Poor bastard,” Dom said, eyeing them across half-court. His girlfriend chewed a nail. She was getting impatient for her turn. Watching the pair nearly trigger the fire alarm at the back exit, Dom decided, This evening might be fun after all.

He put out of his mind that Bree was eating this stuff up, clinging to some hope of talking to Gavin. It wasn’t easy staying quiet about the guy when he was alive, because of the way she looked at him. Dom turned back to see the medium struggling to his feet. Dead two weeks and he’s still edging me out.

Place was awfully crowded for a community séance from the clipper coupon ads, and the medium’s “Go Hawks!” sweatshirt didn’t lessen the somber air hanging on the old gymnasium. High window slats flexed like scorpion tails toward the court, a lone row of hanging bulbs sliced the black in halves. Dom’s folding chair guttered as he shifted in his seat, trying to figure out Bree’s face through the shadow. She screwed it and un-screwed it like a kid with a secret. Somebody’s turn came. A man stood, walking the three-point line like a prisoner headed to the chamber. Her brow was slightly set, eyes a rolling cement-truck payload. Stony but torrential, Dom considered, thinking of a poem.

He didn’t know if she was genuinely interested in all these townies or if she just hoped to spare some teasing on the way home. She knew that if it was sacred, Dom couldn’t joke about it. Gavin didn’t come up a lot.

He tickled her ribs and Bree pecked him on the cheek. That was her reminder that Dom was being an asshole. His cheek still wet, he felt adequately guilty and more than a little self-righteous. If it was just to say we came to one of these things I’d be more into it, Dom heard himself saying, one or two hours ago when she told him about it. His internal monologue commiserated the way only a paranoiac’s could. The real reason she had come made him wince.

She never told Dom about Gavin’s funeral. Didn’t even know the guy had kicked it until somebody spilled later, asking about Dom’s absence at the service. Said it was a beautiful ceremony, the whole graduating class was there. Said Bree got real emotional. Some friends of theirs stayed with her at the cemetery with a bottle of red for hours after the procession left. He never brought it up, because she’d find some way to blame him—some aspect, his paranoia, his jealousy—for hiding that she went. He wasn’t new to being lied to—what stung was the remembering how nice she had been last week, only realizing now she was buying off guilt. She said she’d been at her mother’s house since she wasn’t getting out much after the diagnosis. Forgetting a remainder in basic division. Thought we took this problem out of our lives.

The night of the funeral she came into their apartment drunk, and fell asleep at the kitchen table. Dom found her with the lights off, head on her arm, a shot of whiskey poured and ready. Her dress was rumpled on a chair, a heel snapped off a shoe making its slow crawl beneath the fridge. He smelled the wine on her breath, the sweat in her hair. Slowly he carried her to bed, removing her jeans and the old college sweatshirt and drawing the covers up to her shoulder. He didn’t ask any questions, just felt her hair while she shallow-slept and grumbled. He prayed softly for her mother, whispering, “It’s gonna be okay, kiddo”—until the triteness of the words melted and returned. For an instant, they had significance. A promise that could preserve her mother’s vitality and defy death. Then, quietly stopping, Dom remembered what he was saying. His unconscious lover drooled on his hand in a room where no one could hear his voice.

How did Imuster the cowardice to come to this? The standing man shook hands with a total stranger, who might, if he believed it enough, be speaking for the dead. Dom thought it could happen, but that nobody else really did. The dead were there, they just weren’t listening. It was a rented room meant for easing consciences. As the evening wore on, he scouted for evidence that someone was trying to make a buck off him. He defended his sense of spirituality with the dogged pursuance of a man completely self-aware. The medium continued to assume personalities at each expectant request, and Bree’s silence throughout predicted a long car ride home. There weren’t nearly enough cigarettes in his dashboard to get by; his head surged with every passing charade. The crowd was just like he imagined it, panting like kids meeting Santa after a year apart. “He doesn’t exist, either,” he had declared when they arrived, “but at least he actually shows up at the mall.”

Bree was right along with them, hoping to resurrect a man from her past, whose name still made Dom grit his teeth, even with 300 pounds of dirt making a very strong argument for keeping his cool. Don’t you say all you need to say at the funeral? He hadn’t been to one in years, but he remembered his uncle’s—the drinking, the crying. Where’s the sense in meeting up with a ghost to talk about things you already know?

With her, these impulsive jaunts were usually fun, often unavoidable. But for the most part Dom was having a good night. The medium pointed their way. When she cleared her throat in hesitation, his synapses fired. All of them. She wasn’t here for a dead relative, or some ex who ditched her for Penny Pendleton outside a gas station in Waco; she was channeling Gavin, two weeks dead. Her missed chance. Dom felt like killing him a second time. As she walked that blue-tape bridge, he traced the curve of her spine. If Idied, he thought, counting vertebrae. Her narrow-set shoulder blades just pinched against her cotton tank top, her slender legs gracefully negotiating their uncertain steps. As the medium fastened his shin guards, his lover spoke. “My name’s Briana Reynolds. I’d like to contact my friend Gavin.” Hearing the pert little words, an unconscious image of Gavin’s thick fingers in her hair jumped into Dom’s psyche, and every self-deprecating bone in his ripcord body winced. If Idied.

* * *

The heat was on, but Bree still felt cold. The radio was tuned to a late-night talk show. “And it’s not as if these troops are going because they want to—” some chuckling deejay tucked away, soapboxing the Djibo county airwaves, never having imagined raising the dead. He spoke to all the truckers, the couples sitting in lots just like this, tuning him out in philosophized microcosms. He knew no one was listening. He talked to and for himself, knowing somehow which words were picked up by ears like Bree’s, sitting in silence, dumbfounded. When it came time to tune out life, there was his dead voice, his singular words crackling, that needle jumping twice as high on the words that make it somewhere.

Everyone trickled out of the rec center, flaccid yellow light irking over the sedans. Cavalcaded reds and greens were turned cross-shade as head lamps clattered to life. The moth shadows played out on the hood while the deejay prattled on, talking about some war, some place, some dying person whose only reason to die was obligation—and the ghosts settled down, let the moths take the night, walked back into the woods. Bree looked at the tree line in the distance, the white and red highway lines striping its face, haunted. Dom quietly smoked a cigarette, watching the enfilade. She waited for him to speak. He said nothing. The smoke fingered its way in all directions, charcoal veins in the carpeted ceiling. It moved with a hesitant audacity, taking up the air it knew should be filled with words.

When they were the last car to go, and the streetlights came on, she put it in drive and eased into the night. She put her arm on his shoulder, and for a second it felt wrong there. Then she found its contour, his bony figure begging the roundness of her palm. He smiled weakly, and lit another cigarette. Dom had told her he quit. It seemed they both had secrets. The car’s filtering groan was the only sound as Bree pretended to navigate the familiar roads. She squinted her eyes, kicked on the brights, as if lost in the void. They had lived in Djibo for two years, and she could easily reach home blindfolded and stoned. She smiled to think that she actually had, that time Dom leaned over to cover her eyes and dictate the directions to her. He put one soft hand on her neck, rubbing the bones in her spine and covering her eyes with the other. She turned to mention it to him, her eyes the same flaring chestnut he’d fallen in love with. He wasn’t looking now. Dom sat completely still, silent tears catching stray red-lit numbers from passing signs. He was contemplating the words Ilove you smeared in the foggy window, words he had heard spoken across the divide. Between life and death, between radio silences and lonely drives, Dom fluctuated. There were no stars out, not like the night he’d leaned over, not like the night they moved to their new apartment, two sets of eyes beneath the blanketing. Bree saw only the sharp draw of his cheek silhouetted against a grain of passing trees, those words an accusation and a study. What was their worth? His fingers trembled against the cool glass. They considered their work, the elegant lines and curves that blended in just such a way—did they have to become letters? They could have been anything else. Why letters, Dom thought. Letters were just coffins for sound, plastic exam skeletons to illustrate a point, concretion of something impossible and inconceivable. Ishouldn’t have gone, he decided, but Ihad to.

The deejay: “So, my neighbor’s got a poodle. Mean little thing, bites me when I’m passed out on the lawn.” Somebody laughed. Bree remembered the way he touched her neck. Only he could get that close to her, his hands on her very vitality. The memory vanished quickly, and she would later come back and find it stained with night.