Clancy is watching the Oprah Winfrey show. There is a woman on who insists that the male Y chromosome is directly responsible for war and high interest rates. Her lips quiver as she speaks and she shakes clenched, white-knuckled fists at the ceiling. Her gums are completely visible.
Clancy prefers the straightforward sensationalism and sleaze of the Geraldo Rivera show. He especially likes it when Geraldo gets down on bended knee and squeezes the thigh of the sobbing guest. Yesterday on the show, there was a man whose wife had been slain by a woman driven mad by infertility. Despite modern medical advances, this woman could not have a child of her own, so she stalked a pregnant woman, kidnapped her and her unborn fetus, slit her down the middle like a melon, and stole the baby from her womb. The no-longer-pregnant woman clung to a tree as blood slipped from her. Some man out for a walk saw the dying woman, and he leaned close to her lips so she could tell him this story.
Clancy imagines his family will one day be the focus of a special edition of the Geraldo Rivera show. He can picture Geraldo looking intently into his eyes, caressing his knee.
Clancy grew up watching game shows and cartoons: The Joker’s Wild, Match Game ’79, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Tennessee Tuxedo. He remembers a particular afternoon when he was nine years old and his all-time favorite cartoon was on again. He sat on the floor directly in front of the television set while in another room, behind a door, his mother and a man spoke in squeaky, muffled tones, sounding like muted trumpets. On the television, a cartoon frog sang, Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my ragtime gal, in an imitation of Al Jolson as he danced, straw hat in hand, across a tin box.
Clancy remembers tapping on his knee with a plastic hammer and kicking his leg in the air. He tapped up and down his legs and began hitting harder. He chipped away at his shins like a geologist freeing a fossil. He dropped the hammer and ground his fists into his calves. He bent forward and bit his feet.
Clancy’s mother, Melba, emerged from the bedroom with strands of hair fraying around her face. She rushed up behind Clancy, dropped to her knees, and wrapped arms mottled blue and yellow around him. She grabbed his tiny fists.
“Your arms are colors,” Clancy said. “Sky colors.”
She cupped her body around Clancy’s and rocked back and forth.
Somewhere in the house a door slammed, and Clancy broke from Melba’s embrace, fell on his side. Melba began massaging his legs. “It’s okay now,” she said. “The colors will disappear.”
Clancy sat up. “No,” he said. He looked his mother in the eyes. “My name used to be Clancy.” He turned toward the television.
“What is it now?” Melba rested her chin on his shoulder.
“Clem Cadiddlehopper,” he said, staring at the television.
Melba wrapped her arms around Clancy again. He traced the bruises on her forearms with his finger. “I’ll always love you, Clancy,” she said. “But I won’t always be here.”
On the television, a man grinned and held his hat. The man’s forehead looked like a lawn sprinkler as sweat jumped off it in streams. The man picked up the limp and malleable frog by the scruff of the neck. He sat him on the back of his hand. He puppeted the frog along the box, kicking and dancing his frog legs with his fingers. The man let go of the frog, which slid off his hand in a heap. The frog ribbited indifferently.
“Neither will I,” Clancy said.
* * *
It is evening and Clancy is at the Rosebud Bar and Grill. A charred sled hangs on the wall behind him. His band, Leopold and the Frontal Loebs, has just played. They covered songs by Joy Division, Roxy Music, Kurt Weill, the Velvet Underground, and Patsy Cline. A few people on the dance floor slammed into one another nonchalantly and there was some halfhearted stage-diving but little or no bloodshed. Clancy stands straight and still at the bar and feels house music throb beneath his feet. The layers of rhythm make him blink and swallow in time. He is only nineteen and not inflexible, but he prefers the simpler eras and droning dirges of death and glitter rock.
A tall, emaciated woman has sidled silently up to Clancy. She appears apparition-like before him, anemic and tired. She is clad in all black and is so thin that her face and long white hair seem fleeting. Her skin is nearly translucent, like the invisibly scaled body of a neon tetra. Her veins and blood vessels create a pattern like shattered ice beneath her thin skin.
“Pretty solid tonight,” she says. Her wet, red lips look like two pieces of hot candy.
“Thanks,” Clancy says. When he hears the word solid, it occurs to him that her appearance is that of gelatin, viscous and mutable. A test tube of glassy ichor ambivalent about the state of thickening, liquid stalled on its way to becoming solid. He recalls Mrs. Shepherd’s fifth-grade science class. “The body is 83 percent water,” she had said, her smoky, coffee-soured breath warming his neck.
“My pad?” The woman’s voice pricks his ears. He shrugs his shoulders and follows her out. The bouncer grabs Clancy’s face as he’s about to pass through the entrance. He slaps it twice and pinches Clancy’s cheek. “Can I see your I.D.?” he asks then laughs and pushes him out the doorway.
* * *
“So, are you Leopold?” The woman and Clancy sit at opposite ends of a turquoise vinyl couch with six perfectly square cushions.
“No.”
“Who’s Leopold?”
“He’s a smart guy who killed someone just to see if he could get away with it.” Clancy feels his heart thumping hard, palpitating in his chest, as though it were trying to reposition itself, get his attention.
The woman smiles and kicks off her shoes. “Friend of yours?”
“No,” he says.
“So what’s your name? Johnny Sinew? Dash Riprock?”
“Clancy.” He takes off his glasses. Things blur and his heartbeat slows. He runs his fingers through a cowlicked spew of brown hair.
“Clancy? That sounds like a clown’s name.” The woman moves onto the cushion next to Clancy and pulls her legs under her.
“It was. It was the name of a guy my mom knew in Florida. He went to clown college there.” Clancy begins focusing on small molecules of light that swim through his gaze, protozoan distractions.
“Wow. Vuja de. Synchrofuckinicity, hunh?” The woman laughs, puts her hand on Clancy’s neck, and squeezes. “I didn’t even know you could go to college for that. Pass/Fail?”
Clancy reaches behind his neck and brings her hand over his head. He shakes it. “Charmed,” he says, staring at her hand, at the small, green lizard tattoo that appears to dart with every flick of her wrist.
“Yeah, right,” she says. She notices Clancy staring at the tattoo and says, “Green is the most painful. Ow.” The woman stands up. “I have an eating disorder, but I’m getting counseling.” She puts her hands on her hips and swivels. “Do you think I’m overweight?”
Clancy shakes his head. She raises her eyebrows and leans forward as if to ask No what?
“No, ma’am,” Clancy says. “If you stuck your tongue out, you’d look like a zipper.”
The woman does not laugh. She nods her head vaguely and says, “Thank you.” She grabs Clancy’s wrists and turns them over. “No scars,” she says. “You could almost have been a girl, you know? You have slender fingers and you move slow like you’re just an instant replay of something.”
“If you stuck your tongue out, you’d look like a zipper.”
The woman smiles and sits. She scoots close to Clancy, leans over and licks his cheek. “Mmm. No stubble,” she says. “Do you want to fuck?” She moves his shirt up and puts her finger in his navel.
“No,” he says.
“Didn’t think so. You’re an insy.” She begins to maneuver her fingers beneath his jeans. He grabs her wrist. “You do have a cock, don’t you?”
“I have a cock.”
“Just not led around by it?”
“Blind leading the blind,” Clancy says.
The woman runs her fingers along the white, T-patch of scalp that glares through the closely shorn hair on the side of his head. “Why a cross?” she asks.
“A Saint Christopher’s medal costs twice as much.”
“You Catholic?”
“Just cautious.”
The woman gets up and walks into the kitchen. Clancy puts his glasses back on. He notices a copy of National Geographic lying on the lacquered, petrified-wood coffee table. On the cover there is an aerial shot of a spotty rainforest with an inset of its native inhabitants. They have long, black and gray hair and weatherworn faces deeply incised with dark furrows, like relief maps made of leather. Round plates thrust their lower lips forward pleadingly, as if asking to be filled with food, answers.
Clancy traces the Indian’s lips with his finger. “We’re destroying the earth’s lungs,” he says quietly. He imagines pink, honeycombed membrane darkening, darkening. “We are our own cancer.”
“I don’t smoke,” the woman calls from the kitchen. “I only put sugarless Sorbee hard candies in my ashtrays.” She returns carrying a bowl of bean dip and a bag of pork rinds. She sits on the couch and says, “You know, you should really do more Joy Division covers. I could so get into a good Ian Curtis imitation.”
Clancy feels his heart begin to knock against his chest again. “He killed himself,” he says.
“Yeah,” she says, smiling dreamily at the bean dip.
Clancy stands up. “Gotta go,” he says. “See ya.”
The woman raises one side of her shirt, exposing a breast as small and fragile as a teacup.
“Sure,” she says.
* * *
Clancy thinks his younger sister, Willa, resembles her name: delicate and windblown, though she’s actually quite sturdy. Clancy once watched as her black patent leather shoe met the step toe to edge and she fell backward down a flight of wooden stairs. She had on a ruffled, white dress and looked like a pressed carnation spread out on the floor. She picked herself up and walked back up the stairs, patting the banister gently, saying, “Nice stairs,” as though they were a horse that had just bucked her. She never screamed, and she didn’t bleed. She eats a lot of fruit.
Clancy teases Willa about the amount of fruit she consumes. It seems strange to him that a ten-year-old child would voluntarily choose apples over Ho-Hos. Yesterday Willa ate three peaches in a single sitting, and Clancy said, “Crimany, Willa. You think those things grow on trees?” Willa kicked him as she reached for a banana.
Clancy and Willa live with their stepfather, Buddy. Eight months ago their mother disappeared. She just didn’t come home from work one morning. She worked graveyard at a convenience store called Gitty-Up-and-Go. Her purse was found lying in the parking lot of a Denny’s in Kansas City, Missouri. Her keys, billfold, lucky squirrel’s foot, and sunglasses were still in it, and there were two ticket stubs from the American Royal and a half-eaten Cherry Mash. In her billfold there were three five-dollar bills, two Susan B. Anthony silver dollars, a newspaper clipping about a child born allergic to her own skin, and the paper picture that came with the wallet of a grinning family of four.
Clancy and Willa and Buddy were invited to appear on Unsolved Mysteries. They ate lunch with Robert Stack and the television crew at the Denny’s where Melba’s purse had been found. The producer of the show—a tall, thin man with sculpted muttonchops and two front teeth a greenish white that didn’t match the rest—asked Clancy to tell him everything he could think of that might be revealing.
Clancy leaned close to the producer’s ear and spoke in a confidential tone. “Once, when we were painting Easter eggs, she told me there were people who lived in the Appalachians who had light blue skin, the color of robin’s eggs, as the result of inbreeding.”
“Good. Excellent,” the producer said. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“She said it admiringly,” Clancy said, staring at the producer’s teeth.
“Uh-hunh.”
Buddy was the only one who was interviewed on camera. He began to sob and said, “Melba, honey, if you’re out there watchin’, darlin’, please …” He lowered his face into his hands. “Cut,” someone yelled. Buddy pulled out from under the divan a ceramic plaque that read WHEN THE SMOKE ALARM SOUNDS, DINNER’S READY. On it were four neatly divided lines of white powder, and Buddy rubbed some on his gums. He inhaled two of the lines through a tightly rolled dollar bill. “Shit fire,” he said. “Robert Stack’s in my living room. My living room in the middle of fucking Kansas, man.” He squeezed his nose and sniffed. “Fuck that Judy Garland, man. She’s dead as a doorknocker. I got Robert Stack.”
“On the edge,” one of the cameramen said. “Technically, we’re on the edge of fucking Kansas.”
The woman who portrayed Melba in the reenactment scenes gave Clancy an eight-by-ten glossy photograph of her and her agent’s card in case he ever decided to pursue an acting career. “You got the jaw for it, lover,” she said. “And those hands …”
She gave Willa a bag of tangerines, a Sea Monkey kit, and a kiss. “I’m going to plant one right there,” she said, pointing to Willa’s cheek. She scratched it with her fingernail, kissed the spot, then patted it down. “There. Maybe it’ll grow.”
Willa and Clancy watched as she left in a rented car. The car had two bumper stickers, one that said, WORLDS OF FUN, and another that said, IF TODAY WERE A FISH, I’D THROW IT BACK.
* * *
Now, two months later, Willa wants to activate the Sea Monkeys. “I think I’m ready,” she says to Clancy.
“All we have to do is add water and presto, dancing brine.”
“What if they don’t wake up?”
Clancy looks at the animated pictures of Sea Monkeys on the package. One is grinning and waving and another is flexing its biceps. “It says here that they’re developing heartier strains of Sea Monkeys all the time.” Clancy knows they won’t last long and wishes he hadn’t said this. He knows Willa will name them and look for distinguishing characteristics. She will claim that one has green eyes and that one can sing. She will give them occupations. She will say, “If he were human, I think he’d make a fine math teacher.”
“I don’t think I know enough yet,” Willa says. “What if they want to know where baby sea monkeys come from?”
Clancy pulls Willa’s shirt up, presses his lips against her stomach, and blows raspberries into her skin. Willa laughs, then says, “I’m really too old for that now, you know. But you can do it if it makes you feel better.”
Clancy and Willa decide to let the Sea Monkeys remain dormant a little longer so they will all have something to look forward to. “We’ll give them nine months to get ready,” Willa says.
Willa wants desperately to go to the Rosebud to watch Clancy play. “Please, please, please?”
“You wouldn’t like it, Willa. People smoke a lot and wear spiked bracelets.”
“A woman called today. She asked me if I was yours, and I said yes’.”
“Good.”
“She said she has an eating disorder but she’s getting counseling. I told her I’d make her a banana cream pie if she came over, and she hung up.”
“We can go to the river now,” Clancy says.
* * *
At the river Clancy and Willa wait for land-roving catfish to appear on the banks. Clancy read about them in an issue of Omni magazine. These catfish have developed semiprehensile fins and tails and hardy lungs. They have been spotted perching in banyan and palmetto trees in southern Florida. They have also been seen meandering along the highways. Clancy told Willa about them and she wants to meet them, wants to ask them where they’re going. Willa is certain they will migrate to Kansas. She believes they will be attracted, like the rats of Hamelin, to the soothing hum of tires against the woven metal of the ASB bridge, the “singing bridge.” She feels certain they will become hypnotized by the incantatory song of rush hour traffic, the cars singing, Hear me, here me, hear me, here me.
Clancy pokes a long branch at unidentifiable objects bobbing in the murky water.
“Do you think they call this the Kaw because crows live here?” Willa asks.
“Maybe. Maybe it’s the snoring sound the river makes late at night when the fish are sleeping.”
“I bet that’s it.” Willa throws popcorn onto the water. Gray-green snouts surface and the popcorn disappears.
“The world according to gar,” Clancy says.
“One of the catfish will surely want to take a walk,” Willa says. “Maybe he saw Mama.”
Clancy drops Willa off at home. They saw no ambling catfish. Clancy knows Willa is nervous and curious. She looks for things with which to connect. “My friend Emma Perkins has a Petunia Pig watch,” she says. “I have a Petunia Pig watch.” “Smitty, Mrs. Baumgartner’s dog, has curly brown hair,” she says. “I have curly brown hair.” “The front of the Buick has two big eyes and a smile like me,” she says. “Seek and ye shall find. Seek and ye shall find,” she chants every night before bed, her prayer.
Clancy imagines she is calling the number that connects her with an endless, measured thump-thump—the number for Frankenstein’s heartbeat. Clancy used to call it when he was a child, and he would listen to it for hours, willed the beat of his own heart to synchronize with the sound on the phone. He wanted to be present when the thumping began to slow. If Frankenstein ever expired, Clancy was going to be there to hear it. He imagines Willa listening to it at this very moment. “Frankenstein has a heartbeat,” she is saying.
Clancy wishes he could take Willa to Bagnell Dam where the friendly, fat catfish swarm for the tourists, whose hands rain Corn-nuts and Milk Duds. He knows she would love the big paddleboat and the freestanding faucet of running water suspended magically in midair. He also knows she would be distressed by the glassed-in chickens that peck at toy pianos for a handful of mash. He knows he would buy her a glittery goldstone necklace, a pair of Minnetonka moccasins, and that she would look deeply into every face of every stranger.
Clancy is at the Pierson Park tower. He scales the tall fence despite the warning to KEEP OUT. The tower has been off limits for many years, ever since a little girl climbed it, unsupervised, and fell from the top. Clancy tries to imagine this tragedy, but he can only picture water balloons with Magic Marker faces bursting on the concrete below. Clancy climbs up the six stories and looks out over the city. He thinks he can see the blue and yellow lights of the Southwestern Bell building flickering on. He looks down and sees a girl climbing the fence. She waves at him. She treks up the tower stairs and stands next to Clancy.
“My name’s Zooey,” she says breathlessly.
“Clancy.” Clancy’s palms begin to itch.
“Too cool,” the girl says. “In numerology Z’s and O’s are totally sacred, so like maybe I’m the Messiah.” Zooey laughs. “Unless you know someone named Zozo.”
Clancy shakes his head. “You must be the one,” he says.
“Go Zooey, go girl, go Zooey.” Zooey churns her hands in front of her as though she were shimmying inside a hula-hoop. “I’m sorry. Am I being too forward? My father says I have an obnoxious manner. You look kind of familiar.”
“It’s the hands,” Clancy says, and turns his hands palms up for her inspection. He looks at her hands clenching the railing. She has the letters H-A-T-E written in blue ink on the fingers of her left hand and L-O-V-E on the fingers of her right.
“Do you go to Pierson?”
“No.”
“Wherever you go, there you are,” Zooey says. “Or is it wherever you are, there you go? I saw it on a coffee mug in Macy’s.”
“Can I put my hand on your breast?” Clancy finds himself asking. Zooey turns her head to one side, as though she’s trying to discern words through a din. “To see if I can feel?” Clancy removes his glasses and puts them in his pocket.
“What do you mean?”
“I think I’ve lost the feeling in my hands,” he says. Clancy’s mouth begins to water and he spits over the railing. He lays his head down on his leaning arm.
Zooey takes his free hand and pets it with her thumb. She places his hand on her breast. It feels to Clancy like a knee or a hat or a bagel.
“Fuck,” he says.
Clancy dreams of Melba. She sits in Willa’s plastic pool. Her skin is translucent and blue. Under her skin she is filled with white liquid, like milk in a blue glass. She holds her thin arms out to Clancy. He walks toward the pool, careful to step around the chalk outlines of fish floating in the tall grass.
Clancy hears the telephone ring. Or is it wind chimes? he wonders. Or the pulse in his ear? The grass, the chalk outlines have disappeared. There is only the velvet black of the undersides of his eyelids. He opens his eyes. It is the telephone ringing. Clancy rises and walks into the living room. He feels a smooth, weighted dangle of genitals brush against his inner thighs like clay bell clappers. He hears the click and rumble of the answering machine. Howdy, says the machine.
“Melba?” Clancy says. “Mama?”
You’ve reached the home of Melba, Buddy, Clancy, and Willa, but we’re not in it. Leave a message, and one of us will get back to you soon as we can. Oh, and if this is Sheldon, your parakeet’s fine. He must eat three times his weight in seeds every day. Hulls everywhere. Wait for the beep.
“Hey, dudescicle. What’s shakin’? The scenery is here, etcetera. Oh, by the way, fu-uck you-ou. In the words of the inimitable Frank Tovey: ‘I choke on the gag, but I don’t get the joke.’ Hey Leopold, I don’t give a righteous rat’s ass if you don’t have a prick. Really. Call me anyway. Ignite. Burst into flames.”
Clancy takes the small cassette out of the machine. Buddy only recently turned the answering machine back on. Willa insisted he leave the old recorded message intact. She was convinced that if Melba ever called and heard her own words, she would be magically lured back to them by her former life at the other end of the phone line. Willa believed Melba would be transfixed by the sound of her own voice, that her mind would walk along the miles of underground cable until it reached their front door. Clancy puts the cassette in a shoebox on which Buddy has scrawled the words Personal Effects. Clancy cannot suffer the idea of Buddy having the last word concerning Melba. Using a pencil with an eraser in the shape of Fred Flintstone, Clancy inserts the word Side.
Clancy remembers the origin of the Fred Flintstone eraser. He remembers Willa clutching the eraser in her tight fist like a secret. She had gotten it at the Ice Capades, which featured the larger than life-sized versions of the Flintstones characters cavorting on ice skates. Fred fell down repeatedly, often taking his sidekick, Barney, with him. Wilma and Betty were graceful, with their big heads cocked to the side, and looked like sleek animals as their spotted dresses waved.
Melba knew one of the ticket sellers and got fifth-row seats on the bottom tier of Municipal Auditorium. Every now and then when the skaters came near, slicing to a stop, they could feel a spray of ice prickle against their cheeks. Once Bam-Bam leaned over the railing and shook the hand of the little boy in front of Willa. Willa shrank into her chair at the sight of the big, cushioned palm reaching out.
Suddenly the lights began to dim, and Dino swished to a halt, center rink. A voice announced that it was time to determine who the two lucky ticket holders were. The children with the winning tickets were going to ride on Dino’s tail as he wound around the rink, looping and curving. The numbers were called, and Melba raised Willa up by the waist, shaking her in the air like propaganda. Clancy stood and pulled on his mother’s sleeve. “No,” he said. “She’ll get hurt. Please.”
Melba smiled and ignored the tug on her arm. Willa hung silent and limp. Dino picked up the first winner on the other side of the auditorium then swung around and backed up near Willa. An usher took Willa from Melba’s arms and placed her on a cushioned indentation in Dino’s tail. She placed Willa’s arms around the stomach of the little boy in front of her, who held on to one of the pointed plates that ran down Dino’s back and tail. Clancy remembers thinking that the animated Dino didn’t have armored plates running down his spine, that they must be there only so that small children can ride on his tail. Willa looked back over her shoulder as Dino’s four legs skated away, the tip of his tail swatting the air behind him. The song “Dizzy” played over the speakers. Children clapped and bit the heels of their hands. They waved fluorescent pinwheels in the air.
Clancy saw Willa let go. He watched as her arms released the boy in front of her. As she tried to clap, she toppled backward off Dino’s tail. She lay sprawled on the ice. All the people in the auditorium gasped “Oh” at the same time like a canned response. People dressed in white skated out and scooped Willa up off the ice like debris. They took her to an office where a sleepy medical student waited for just this sort of calamity. The medical student looked somewhat disappointed to discover that only Merthiolate and Band-Aids were called for but forced a smile as he handed her a kazoo and a Fred Flintstone eraser.
That night Clancy rubbed Willa’s feet as Melba rocked her back and forth in her arms. They fed her mint chocolate chip ice cream and bright pink marshmallow rabbits. Clancy colored in Willa’s toenails with her turquoise-blue Magic Marker as they watched The Courtship of Eddie’s Father on television. Willa cried at the thought of the deportation of Mrs. Livingston, the Japanese housekeeper, who always spoke low and hushed like a humming child. “She’s the one that makes things calm,” Willa said.
Dry sobs bent Melba’s body, and she kissed Willa’s bruised knees and scabbed shins. Melba laid her head on Willa’s knees and petted her thighs. “Your knees aren’t speaking to me,” Melba said. “I’m sorry, chicken,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s only blue skin,” Willa said, patting her mother’s cheek.
* * *
Clancy rummages through the shoebox. He touches all the objects: crocheted gloves, a tarnished Eastern Star ring, photographs, a mermaid-shaped shoehorn, baby teeth, a gold-brocade coin purse. He looks at a picture of Melba. Her face is blurred into the landscape behind her. She clutches her arms. Her grayish skin seems too big for her, as though she were getting ready to shed. Clancy sets the photograph down and slips his hands into the stretchy gloves, taut as new skin. He walks outside and digs a hole in the dry soil. He places Melba’s picture in the hollow and tamps the earth down over it.
Back inside, Clancy clutches the Fred Flintstone eraser in his dirty, gloved hand as he walks to Willa’s room. With blue chalk he draws the outline of a fish on her chalkboard. He sits down beside her and kisses her knees. Willa’s eyes open. Clancy lays his head on her chest, listens. “And you have a heartbeat,” he says.