Muskie

When I arrive Mallenni's already dead; dressed for the occasion, all stardust and moonlight in a blue sequined dress that fits him baby-doll tight. His skin - as cold as a pearl necklace - holds up well to the illusion of '30s vamp, despite the gauche, treacherous pools of blood collected along his bare, hair-soft arms and shaven legs. Smeared lip-gloss - like a punch to the mouth - only adds to his cinematic but trenchant expression; a captured moment of effeminate redoubt packaged in an obdurate, glistening moue that only second stage rigor and a mouthful of pentobarbital will give you. He lies across a cream-coloured couch, his tousled blond hair bathed in the orange sodium of streetlamps from the apartment’s only window, where I notice how he cradles a half-consumed bottle of Jack, like a baby: suicide in the Grand Guignol tradition, staged incongruously by an acolyte of Coco Chanel.

On the carpet at the foot of couch, a receipt for the hooch reads the 7-Eleven on eighth, quarter to the eleventh hour: not a place Mallenni, near 5.5 and 120 pounds, would have clipped a steely stiletto into – not at that hour - without a berretta in his purse. But there's no berretta here …no liberated twenty thousand bucks …no nothing, and plenty of it, just a fine collection of shoes.

A few photographs, in the back parlour, detail Mallenni’s early years: the coddling mother - young then - and the tall, willowy sister: the same features more broadly met, but with the beguiling awkwardness of protective censure and custom (a clairvoyant, Mallenni had once confided). Both women stare out from the porch of their gentrified home, holding smiles as rich and tired as a third hot fudge sundae. Later photographs, out front on the portmanteau, detail a final year of busy social occasion: one - the last on a corner shelf - portray us all as group, attending an annual fishing contest at Sand Creek; Samuels, jeans rolled up to his knees, crouches in the shallows while we all look on, the expectancy of laughter etched onto our faces. The frame catches the right moment, Samuels breaking through his own reflective shadow to land a muskie, the hugest fish you ever saw. I recalled the moment: how he’d missed – the unsettled self-reflection on the water’s surface causing him to panic, his frenzied desire getting the better of him – but how he’d come to describe the one that got away in the public house later that day, measuring out the imaginary fish between the stubby digits of his paw-like hands: “it was this,” he told us, having convinced himself that it was. An evocation, perhaps, to some eventual legacy, land or property, he would later inherit. For myself, I preferred to remain on the surface, skimming stones over the placid waters, weary of the elegant wrap of fleeting prizes as they cut a route between fallen timbers and jagged stone. “You’re all potatoes,” Munson had once said, echoing the complaints of five women, five long relationships in which I’d doubted the promise they may have held. All potatoes. I guess I held it that way.

II

Almerdale, a town defining itself as seventy miles outside Wisconsin might have been a cocktail: there's a route where you drive down into its basin, where the aroma of cultivated lemon groves arrives on minor dervishes, and a warm sticky air clings to the sidewalk beneath canopies of cherry blossom. The thrill of periodical cicadas interrupts every thought, leading its residents to disport themselves from one happy hour to the next.

If it had been - a cocktail that is - Mama Mallenni would have been the pip of sobriety, the intrusion of guilt to a destitute mind. She told me straight - as up-and-down straight as the way she looked me over, as straight up and down as the white picket fence surrounding her neat little lawn - Billy wrote to her twice a week and never kept secrets from her. If he did have secrets she would know all about it, wouldn't she?

I said I guessed she was right, but perhaps she knew something, even so. Something she didn't know she knew: that same kind of mother's logic right back at her. That I needed something because Munson needed something, Munson having lost twenty thousand bucks, and Billy a suspect on account of the familiar bills found in his wallet. Munson, I didn’t tell her, checked the accounts every night – the forged notes put to bed like prized orphans, rarely let out without a page of details in a couple of ledgers. To his forged notes he’d added us – his forged men, his anglers – mere copies of the real McCoy’s; men who reacted to the eddies of life’s great stream, men who had uncovered no great truth is their shallow existences.

Mama Mallenni, raising herself up – all 4.8 of her - to the top stair of her ramshackle portico, vanishing into shade, said she hoped I wasn't implying any threat, young man (no Mama, it's not my job to imply anything; good, she said). She knew her boy, by the way, knew him only too well in fact. I said she probably did at that. She shook her head, pouring herself another mint julep mocha. Five minutes later, and the sister, Leonora, arrived, carried along on an icy breeze. I took in her perfume and held her close, knowing her.

III

I took her to lunch: the sister: a portrait of iridescent beauty – those dark opal eyes, that translucent complexion - a woman who moved in words and gestures, changing my opinion of her moment to moment. I broke the news so she could break it to Mama: I wasn't being paid enough for that. She took it pretty coolly, I thought, supplying perfunctory tears at a squeeze, then sitting right back again, smoothing down the ripples in her green summer dress, cooler than the forth year of matrimony. She toyed with the thick layer of greasy suds over the toxic skim her franchise espresso. He was never happy, she offered by way of explanation. "But he was the best sister I never had."

I said I wondered about that, then added, “He was a popular one, though.”

She nodded, adding disdainfully, “Men chose to purge themselves, don’t they? Confession, categorization, control. Billy had a good safe pair of ears, I guess. He understood that in men.”

“And what about what he heard over the money?”

“There were suspicions, always were,“ she said. “Someone was trying to set him up, that’s what Billy told me. No names were mentioned, though. But I know Billy could never steal anything. That takes some confidence, doesn't it? Something he was always short on.”

I nodded, but I wasn’t convinced; I had seen the shoes.

IV

I never got round to considering how she did it: how she convinced me – us - to turn up at her apartment in the projects. Those dazzling green eyes, that exquisite smile, perhaps. Three days later, though, and we were all there - gathered around her long table, an antique oak-framed affair beneath a mauve velvet cloth, running through the centre of her blue two-room sanctum. Flashing billboards gave off red and green notes to the blue: a riot of ephemera; her workplace, she told us, where she acted as a conduit between two natures, two worlds. At least, that was how she sold herself, and who's to say it hadn't bought her the white sable and her own body weight in Richmond cherries. Munson was sufficiently riled to just go with it; paying no heed to the potential for rumour. Neither should he, he said - pay it heed, that is - because if it did get out (that he was talking to the dead now) there would be no one left to spread it around.

Leonora had dressed for the occasion. An appearance alone, maybe, to wake the dead: green silk chemise over Billy's electric blue dress, and a diamond necklace as a grace note, following the slender bow of her breast bone. The maple gloss of her lipstick shimmered under the flickering life of seven black candles, artfully arranged across the table. She beckoned us to be seated, all hands placed face down on the table - as far as they'd ever been from a gun - as she, at the other end, called for all spirits present.

Something filled the room. A palpable stink of stony cold cynicism, perhaps, like the stale, acrid smell of cheap prohibition tobacco. It was sufficiently familiar to each of us to hook on and hold us there.

The sister did her thing. It was a show. The circus, the lights, the industrial magic. Meanwhile, the clowns were silent, the way us clowns ought to be; the entire family Grimaldi; in the wings, mere shadows. Observers of the séance, the struggle, the mumbo jumbo, the rolling eyes, the little voice of a lost spirit - always a crowd pleaser - and then, finally...

A cool calm confidence I hadn't detected before; exuberant, showy, something I would have associated with someone else had that someone else not been dead. She rose up - the sister did, or was it him, the brother - slowly, sensuously, smiling a fleeting elusive smile, walking over to a full-length mirror in the furthest corner of the room. Here, for a moment, she appeared to admire herself, as though for the first time, comfortable at last in who she was, in all aspects of her appearance - mind and body finally complimented. The appearance smiled back, a self-intact.

"Billy. Billy, is that you?" Munson's gravelled voice dropped its usual circumspection.
"What happened to the money, boy?" Like there was a need to be direct with the dead, like it was communication, only long distance.

Munson never saw the gun, heard the click of the hammer - none of us did - a couple of missed opportunities from the small silver item in the sister's grip, smashing mirrors into a myriad of blue-lit tinctures from the electric neon billboards outside, a million tacky opportunities flashing up sporadically over the blanched faces of six ordinary men. It was Samuels who had pushed back his chair and taken it, falling back, a chest wound dripping down the white silk shirt, like an old school tie. It was the shoes that drew attention, however, those upturned Jimmy Choos, a half size too small for Samuels: the one thing to save the girl’s life.

V

The cache was an easy find: Samuels being a man with little imagination, but a large enough mattress. It was positioned below a large wooden plaque, where he’d mounted a fish he’d never caught. It made description easier, that’s what he’d said: “it was this,” he’d say and feel on safe ground with the fish as the centre of reference. Twenty thousand bucks out in a tidy package, wrapped in plastic that shimmered like the surface detail of Ottawa’s great lake.

Steve Dorell is a MA student in Critical and Cultural Studies. He has written several stories and a play performed at the Oxford Playhouse.

Email: Steve Dorell

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