Free The Beetle Leg by John Hawkes Page B

hot handle rags strewn across the stove and around the skillet. The netting with its black stocking patches was drawn over her head, all the way down her shirt front and tucked in the apron, two sides finally tied beneath her arms. She sat on the bunk with the covered basket beside her.
    “There’s other things of his I’d like to have,” she said and pulled on a pair of shoes that had once belonged to the older brother. Ma, if she could have her way, or could get Luke to do it, would rob the barber shop of its museum, steal antiquities from the glass shelf in the window, hide his chary remnants from the passing eyes of strangers and men getting a shampoo. “There’s things have feeling,” she said, “and a use around the house.”
    His razor was spread open before the shaving mug on a square of Christmas paper, marked by a little card tied to it with yellow string. A nick had been cracked in the bone handle and there was scrollwork on the blade like that etched upon a naval sword. A bottle of tonic and septic pencil stood on either side. “There’s more waysto skin a cat,” the barber said, “than bury him,” and for fifty cents the relics could be touched, a hooked shadow here, a bristling object on its back, gilt flowers of porcelain. On holiday nights he left a light in the window and on hot afternoons when the shop was empty he honed the razor, drawing it back and forth, achieving a Sunday morning shine. “No, sir,” he would say, “those things are not for sale, not them.” Smoothing white across the face or clipping halfway up the head of hair, he would add, “But there’s postcards of them at Estrellita’s.”
    Ma had all the photographs of his effects. It was the best she could do. She wrote on the backs of them:
    “I remember this one, remember it well.”
    “Bought in Clare for twenty-five cents. I didn’t take to the color. Right off.”
    “Cut 1 lb. fish fresh as it buys to four pieces…”
    The trails beyond the cabin called her, the scurrilous running of velvet pads was in her ears, there was a yapping in the air and the whole range to cover. She could go, the skillet was smoking properly.
    “Now you put the idea out of your head. You ain’t buying one of them concertinas. I couldn’t stand it to be playing at me all the time.” The Mandan put her short brown finger under the type and read along line by line until she reached the price.
    The clamor of caged fowl drifted up, as seagulls used to cry before, over the dam.
    Thegna loved Harry Bohn. She cut their letters into the bridge, as fishpole dangled and she slumped against the timber, and cut them into the yellow drying boards around her sink. Two boot trails appeared and gently sank in the mud; man and woman stooped together over hooks snagged in buried rushes. Behind them bubbledtheir heavy tracks. Hers were deeper. Never tucked in, hanging to the outside of rubber boots, her skirts fell heavily in the mud and dried stiffly in the sunshine when she climbed, Norwegian braids trembling against a sunburnt neck, to one of her sporting places. When the cook and man dragged across the river bed, if they paused, if he spoke or looked at her, she covered her face with red hands and shook, ploughing under little fingers of fish and churning the mud.
    When his back was turned she freed herself and, cheeks blotched with the rash of laughter, swelled and cold, she stared at him through drawn eyes and rooted, as between fiords, toward the fishing ground. One had promised to marry Thegna, had married Ma instead, and then, in wedding suit and cut lip, hatless and with socks hanging below his ankles, had returned to honeymoon with the cook in Mistletoe. But he was faithless, black and cold. And she had never loved him as she now loved Bohn in the shadow of the dam and as long as it stood to hold back the changing waters.
    She fried her catch behind abandoned pipes and gazed tenderly at the mountain, sticking thin bones into the sand one by one