Familiaris

by David Wroblewski

The Beast—known to the world as Alfons Svoboda—fancied himself a Colossus of the New World sort, Rooseveltian and bootstrappian. He spoke not to a person but to an audience of one, and his stories portrayed a man bestriding the vast agricultural-industrial Midwest, wholly self-made, worldly, canny, adventurous, capable of heights of idealism one instant and bare-knuckled negotiation the next—a human electromagnet reorienting the iron filings in the souls of his fellow men. Autobiography tended to erupt from The Beast in the evenings, when his constitutional bourbon was in full circulation, and thus evenings were when Mary was liable to point out to The Beast that his aspect was more Taftian than Rooseveltian, the likely source of any detectable awe among the populace. Also, that what he was was a cash register salesman.

A person could probably add to the net happiness of the world just by running a restaurant that served perfect home fries.

Mama came out and saw her best chair in the mud. She have a terrific hand, that woman. She could beat two children at once.

Don’t look away. Don’t get scared. It’s all good news. You’ll be safe and rich and you’ll sleep all day. Now don’t you feel happy, Mikey Miserable? How about you, Frankie Frown? Frankie Fucking Frown from Tragedy Town. I’m saying guaranteed, in writing. Legally blinding. Uh, binding. Nothing left to worry about.”

Kenny Flanagan’s imagination has been hibernating in a small cave in a riverbank near the bottom of his spinal cord, munching scraps and bones of memory, and it will remain in hibernation for as long as John Sawtelle knows Kenny.

Have you ever walked through an old woods and been struck by the thought that most of the trees have been growing there since before you were born? And that every branch on every tree has its exact shape and length because of the shape and length of every branch near it—all of them maneuvering in slow motion to get their leaves out into the sunlight? And suddenly you understand you’re not looking at something called ‘the woods.’ You’re looking at the story of every tree entangled with every other tree, and every rainfall, every windstorm, every sunny day, every blizzard.”

He felt not hungry, not thirsty, not tired, not even remotely bored, simply above all physical concern, in communion with the movement of time and the world’s steady turning, and he wondered if this was how it felt to be immortal, to know that life had a definite vessel, a tangible purpose: caretaker and courier of the rare, the valuable, the beloved.

The Maple Frog was without question the ugliest boat twenty-year-old Walter Paine had ever seen. It may even have been (as its captain and co-owner Percy DuGreen often claimed—more strenuously the more he drank) the ugliest boat currently afloat on any of the five Great Lakes. No small claim: in 1871 there were plenty of wrecks heaving around those waters, and Walter often felt they’d spent their day jockeying among a flotilla of leaky longboats, wounded schooners, leprous tugs, and rancid fishing launches, each a unique and horrible spectacle of maritime decrepitude.

Her engine—Percy called it the world’s only coal-fired anchor—was a concatenation of clanking, hissing ironwork that served mainly to belch sausages of black smoke into the air (smoke which quite often moved across the lake more quickly than the Frog).

“Captain’s called upon to curse his ship now and then,” he said. “Raises the spirits of the crew and swells the hull to seal it.”

Early in their courtship Mary had told him that she believed a house was an idea written in a language of shapes, and if the idea was sound a person would know, even if it looked like a hovel from the outside.

He felt practiced up at not talking.

Frank began enumerating John’s crimes and personal failings, a list that began with, but was not limited to: selfishness, ignorance, unpredictable sloth, preening overinformedness on obscure topics, a penchant for self-serving misunderstanding, promiscuous use of metaphor, and other corruptions.

“I had a thought the other day: Coming here has made everything we don’t care about easier, and everything we do care about harder. So maybe that’s how we’re going to know what we care about.”

Numbers are free, infinite, and trustworthy. The four master curves are straight, upward-sweeping, sideways-sweeping, and wiggly.

the second principle stated: All matter is equally divisible, except money. The third was even more enigmatic: Individuals act; cultures respond; species evolve. Tailor your strategy accordingly.

4. A surplus of tools is as good as a dearth. 5. Never lift what can be rolled; never roll what can be carted; never cart what you didn’t need in the first place. 6. For a surprise, slow down when instinct calls for speed. 7. There is no such thing as misbehavior. Only behavior. 8. After an elephant charges, the dolt counts his foot-prints, the genius his flea-bites. 9. Family is rationality spelled backward. 10. Most mouths would profit from two roofs and no front door. 11. You can’t reason with dirt.

Then again, if people fell in love at first sight, maybe they could fall into annoyance at first sight, or—in the case of Frank and So Jack—into whatever the opposite of brotherhood was.

The voodoo of throttle and balance that made a motorcycle at speed like a blade.

What she did next wasn’t exactly dancing, to John’s eye, but a twisting and flinging of limbs, as if each part of her body had resolved to dance but hadn’t talked it over with the others.

Mary had masterminded a rational reconstruction of the house, room by room, wall by wall, steaming away wallpaper, sometimes even removing the plaster beneath the paper in order to replaster in the rough country style she liked, then sealing the plaster with plain white paint. She’d even plastered firecrackers into the walls, a trick of the Chinese she’d read about, so that if a fire ever broke out, the firecrackers would explode and wake everyone.

These developments delighted John—marvelous for Mary, Elbow, Frank, and So Jack. But they were also dangerously interesting, distractions from boredom, the main task he’d set for himself in the hope of discovering his own rare dearity. Because, in truth, he still had no idea what that might be.

They were Mostlys, as So Jack called such dogs—Mostly Mutts—big, robust animals of no discernible breed, distinguished primarily by what they weren’t: poofy-haired, squash-faced, bald, hairy, tiny, enormous, or otherwise freakish. They were dog dogs, what dogs turned into when no one stopped them from joyfully humping their hearts out.

They walked the color out of the sky.

“I think if you ever do something like this again, Papineau’s going to be the least of your problems.” “Roger. Verily, thou frowneth upon my decision as the mighty storm layeth its shadow upon the fields of the earth. That about sum things up?” “Except for the part where I kicketh your ass,” Gar told him. But he was smiling.

“There’s an urge to fight in men,” he’d say. “Some men bury the urge in tiny hourly doses of cruelty dealt out to their loved ones, their work partners, their fellow men. Parceled out that way, the urge is never-ending. But we take that passion, that rage, and we give it to the dogs, and the dogs are fortified and made stronger. They fight for us, so that we can go home drained and relieved of our suffering.”

“Some people think any kind of fighting is a sick kind of entertainment, but name me one kind of entertainment that isn’t a fight. Every movie is a fight. Men fighting for girls. Girls fighting over guys. Men fighting for money. Men at war. The more vicious the fight the better the movie. Show me a movie that can’t be boiled down to a fight, and I’ll show you a movie nobody buys a ticket to. Any book you’ve ever read on purpose is the story of a fight. The word ‘story’ means fight, I guarantee it. Man against man. Man against nature. Man against ignorance or disease. Even man against fate itself. But it’s always a fight. Baseball, football? Every single wrestling match? Fights, all of them. Car races? That’s fighting in cars. If fighting is sick, then we’re all sick, because fights are all we’re interested in. And if we can’t watch a fight, we’ll start a fight, just to have one to watch.

Emerson: “Build, therefore, your own world.” Wasn’t that the most unthinkable thought of all? Because what it suggested, when you really, really looked at it, was that the only thing standing between what a person wanted and what a person got was acting on ideas no one else would even admit to having. And hadn’t his great secret, his rare dearity, always been that unadmittable thoughts came to him so fluently, so lightly burdened?

Yet despite his best efforts to repel customers, some combination of his persnicketiness in the kitchen and the fancy lighting in the dining room made the dishes seem perversely exotic. Some nights the menu featured only frankfurters, Jell-O, and creamed spinach. But the barman had a comprehensive selection of overpriced wines, and he would earnestly confer with guests over whether the Rüdesheimer Apostelwein or the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti best complemented the peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches.

“So everything about a meal has to be just right or it’s ruined?” Mary said. Frank looked at her. “Is that a trick question?” “You’re being ridiculous.” “How many bites of shit does it take to ruin a meal for you?” he said. “Me, it’s one.”

“So? If you take an aspirin, do you stop being you? You want to be different than you were, to be able to feel and do things you couldn’t otherwise feel and do. Why else would you bother drinking something as revolting as coffee after waking up in the morning?” “Now you’re getting things backward,” Mary said. “The question is, without coffee, why would I bother to wake up in the morning?”

“Well, think again. The fact is, I learned to cook out of self-defense. One thing I discovered about John was that his mother taught him not to talk with food in his mouth. And during those brief moments when he couldn’t speak, I started to notice the other people he’d somehow tricked into putting up with him. Not just putting up with him, but actually enjoying being around him. I noticed their quality. And I asked myself, if they were all like that, of quality, good people, the best people I’ve ever known, then what was I doing there? The only answer I could come up with was that for some reason, John Sawtelle thought I was quality, too.

suppose you could do one impossible thing.