Free A Kind of Flying: Selected Stories by Ron Carlson Page B

just breathed it all in and began tacking the garlic to my own sweet home.
    I framed all the doors in garlands first, in case there wasn’t enough garlic, tapping the nails through the center of each bulb, spacing them three fingers apart. Then I ringed the windows, the basement windows, and the storm cellar door. The oil each clove gave its nail slathered down my wrists to the elbows, but after twenty minutes, I couldn’t smell a thing. It all gave our house a fuzzy, gingerbread look, not unbecoming and kind of festive. By the time I finished, I was high, high with a new taut certainty that I was unquestionably on the right track, and high with a sort of major garlic sinus dilation. My eyes felt poached.
    I ran to the studio to retrieve my car keys, but was again arrested by the three paintings and worked for a furious moment on the third. This “volleyball” was becoming more elongated than the other two and looked like, I’ll say for now, a rose setting sun in a green and ocher sky. But something told me that when I looked into the canvas I wasn’t looking all the way to the horizon. Something was trying to get out; I love that sense. When the phone rang, I came to and strode out to my old Buick. I sat still in the driver’s seat for a moment, listening to the phone ringing. It sounded like a vague, intermittent alert for the future going off in garlic house.
    In my book, Life Before Science, it said:
    Garlic and garlic substitutes were often used by tribes in Africa, Asia, Australia, and England to heat a childless domicile. The huts were festooned with fresh garlic once a month, and the man and the woman wore garlic in various forms sewn into a garment or on a string around the neck, or crushed into the hair. Some tribes were known to use a garlic mattress, which was rumored to have never failed. In many societies the smell of garlic was synonymous with fecundity.
    EIGHT
    YOU LAY yourself open to attack by a powerful creeping chagrin if you drive miles away from home one fine afternoon, as I did, guided only by your overwhelming desire to have children and by a lurid, illustrated half-page advertisement from the back pages of the scurrilous local shopper The Twilight Want Ads. Just the tabloid illustration mocked me: a crude wood block print featuring, or so it said, Mrs. Argyle, “Gypsy Wizardress, Alchemist, Seer, and Tax Advisor,” her face seemingly radiating small lightning rays of power and—what I took to be—understanding.
    So I set my mouth against the thorough feeling that I was a fool, and I followed the directions Mrs. Argyle had given me over the telephone, driving toward the village of Boughton, where I had never been.
    The interview that followed, in the woody turnout three point four miles from Boughton, with Mrs. Argyle, is still a mystery to me. Her rusty Ford van was there along with the two jade talismans hanging from the rearview mirror. I stood around for a while, trying to look innocent, and then finally I put two hundred dollars on the seat, as I’d been instructed in our call, took the necklaces, and left.
    Driving home was a different matter. Cruising the rural roads in Connecticut after twilight in the early summer, past farmers’ fields and the little roadhouses, their pink Miller Beer signs just beginning to glow in the new darkness, with two guaranteed jade talismans in my pocket, I began to swell with confidence and good cheer. I sang songs that I made up (with gestures) and grinned like an idiot. I never saw Mrs. Argyle at all. I motored toward Bigville, my mouth full of song, the jade glowing at my side.
    At garlic headquarters, my house, Story was waiting. I could see my sweet mayor and Ruth Wellner, my favorite county attorney, having Piels Light on the rocks with a twist in the living room. Piels beer is the only thing Story drinks, always on ice with a twist, and I had come to see the brown bottles with their cadmium orange labels as little symbols of pleasure and ease,