Exclusive Excerpt: "Fugue"
A New Novel by Paul A.Toth

Chapter Eight: Begin

Divided I crawled, semi-united I stood, and disembodied I fell. All I ever wanted was to walk the line like Johnny Cash, strong and true, but the line walked me until that letter arrived, and then it stomped me. It might be said it wasn't even a line but a circle or a hole.
      I ran my fingernail along the words, pressed deep into the paper by what must have been more punching than typing.

" If I were you, I'd keep your potatoes peeled. Make sure they don't get mashed. Maybe then you'll keep your eyes on one girl. Or maybe you won't stay in one place until you're dead."
                                                                                    Love, M.W.

     M.W.: Mary Whitcomb, a menthol cigarette, cool on top, sweet underneath, tar deep inside. She liked to burrow into my armpit and sleep until noon. She didn't saw logs; she clearcut the rainforest. "You've got weird eyes," she often said, "like you'd have to hang upside down to cry." She was somebody I tried to forget. But when the envelope arrived postmarked San Diego, California, I knew it had to be from Mary Whitcomb.
     I thought about playing pepper off Rosie's brain about the letter, but I'd been getting bored before it ever arrived. Rosie knew it, too. For months, I'd been daydreaming about the women in my past. And when Rosie phoned my unnatural mother from behind the bedroom door, I knew they were talking about the resurrection of The Wanderer.
     I'd been in one place for two years. Long before, prior to the closing of the General Motors' plant in Saginaw, Michigan, I took a buyout. They offered me a pension plus free room and board at vacation resorts across the nation. I knew that plant was headed to Mexico, so I grabbed the deal. I was ready to begin the wandering Mother so hated, blaming it on herself, I suppose. I went straight to California and never left.
     For years, I found my way to every kind of golden place and woman, including San Diego and Mary Whitcomb. At the end of my wandering, I met Rosie, a black cloud blocking the sun. I enjoyed her on my semi-white chest, holding me down. Mother liked  Rosie. Though Mother was no friend to minorities, I had finally ceased being The Wanderer, as she had named me during the post-factory years.
     Rosie and I lived in a canyon house three hours from San Francisco, where the only sound came from trucks on the way north and south. I paid for it with my resort deal, selling it to another guy retiring young. It was like selling it to myself, only I thought I'd changed. There was a day I would have tattooed Rosie on my chest, like my namesake song said. But the time was coming when I might have wanted that name sandblasted off my skin.
     Our house was so far from civilization that the nearest paper, The Gooseberry Daily Sentinel, took two days to arrive by mail. What that sentinel was on the lookout for was anybody's guess because nothing ever happened. But Rosie insisted, "Educated motherfuckers read the newspaper," and so the papers piled unread beside the couch.
     I folded the letter and slipped it into my shirt pocket. I was already thinking about taking a trip to San Diego and knocking on Mary Whitcomb's door. Although I wasn't planning on leaving for good, I couldn't be sure I was coming back. Rosie was eating more and more and lately eyeing me. I kept a full fridge, and I wasn't planning on jumping inside.
     She was pulling dirty tricks, trying to voodoo me into staying put, one day teasing me with lingerie, the next pretending to ignore me, reading her books. Sometimes she wailed and hollered, other times she knelt beside the bed and prayed. "Goddamn it," she'd whisper, "change him, Lord."
     Now she emerged from the bedroom draped in slink, the negligee colorizing those big brown nipples red as Mars, her heart full of war.
     "What the hell'd you just stick in your pocket?"
     I shrugged, knowing she'd been watching behind my back. "Nothing."
     "I can see the goddamn paper from here. What is it, a love letter?"
     She stood in front of a bookshelf that bowed under the weight of works by Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker. On a stand in the center was the prized first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. "This is my cabin," Rosie liked to say, "and you're my Uncle Tom."
     "But Rosie," I'd say, "I'm not black."
     "Well, you live like a black man. Probably die when you're forty."
     "I'm already forty."
     "Then you already dead."
     We played that scene a hundred times, a one-act play for visitors who never arrived.
     The trouble with Rosie? I could never be sure which version was more real than the other, the Rosie who mocked and derided me or the Rosie with whom I shared a love of self-mis-education.
     For me, it started at the factory. I had to keep my head full to sit there pulling a lever all day. When I wasn't at work, I read, went to museums and libraries, bought all the records I could, just to keep my mind on something besides the clock and the machine. Sometimes I thought I'd give writing a try, but when I went to a bookstore and browsed the new releases, I found that modern literature concerned itself and nobody else with domestic minutiae, divorce its favorite subject, usually between two professors, a world without a sky, populated by those whose educations had consumed them, leaving no choice but to do the suburban waltz, their only relief dogs and nostalgia for baseball, their only hope the nose-chained children they had botched and now put the weight of the future upon, for that was their mantra: "The children, the children!" A whodunit or blastoff to Mars had more relevance and reality than these tales of comfortable woe. But one day I would find a trajectory for my imagination, perhaps this very journey.
     Rosie, on the other hand, read to recreate herself, everything she learned reshuffled into a Rosie-poped Vatican complete with its own cathedral. She believed Jesus was a holy ghost, but she didn't believe he was a god. She said he sometimes interposed on our behalf, depending on his mood. She insisted cursing in prayer was appropriate, for it attracted his attention. And so it was not uncommon to hear her in the kitchen yelling, "Motherfuck it, Lord, just once make this man do the goddamn dishes."
     Her breasts pinched the gold crucifix as she bent toward me and snatched the envelope from my pocket.
     "Son of a bitch," she said, scanning the note fast. "What the hell is it?"
     "It's a letter."
     "I can see that, Tom. Who the fuck's it from?"
     "I got a feeling --"
     "You got a feeling what?"
     "It's from a girl I used to know."
     "White girl? Well, what's it for? You get some girl pregnant?"
     "I don't know what it's for, but I'm thinking about finding out."
     "You are, huh? I'll get the road atlas."
     Unbeknownst to me, the atlas had for some time slept beneath the bookshelf, waiting for a honeymoon trip we'd never taken. She tossed it at me.
     "There you go."
     "Rosie, I --"
     "Rosie you what? You thinking about going? Go."
     "Let me think, would you? It's a threat, not a love letter."
     Outside, trucks zoomed past. Her nipples stared at me, the two red planets glowing with impending violence. Sometimes I shivered when alone with her. It wasn't hard to imagine Jesus slipping her a knife when the mood was right, like right now.
     My head ached with wanderlust and fear. I was too bored to stay, too afraid to leave. I'd never been good at being alone, starting with my youngest years, when Mother would toss a soccer ball at my feet and yell, "Kick it! Anybody can play soccer. Kick it like a boy, goddamn it!"
     I'd only slept with ten women, Rosie included. I didn't lose my virginity until I was twenty years old. When relationships ended, I moved. My lengthiest stint in one place was that factory, and I lived those years by myself, too crazy from pulling a lever ten hours a day for anyone to bear afterwards. I felt up a few women now and then, but I couldn't get under their skin the way I liked. They left before they came.
     On the road, my modus operandi was to meet a woman by chance and start talking. I was a wayward cat, and it surprised me how often I found myself in a new owner's home within hours, more adoptee than lover. Each guardian soon learned why I shuffled from home to home. But still the next would accept me, first with a bowl of milk, then an open door, and finally the bed. Luckily, this kitten had a wallet in his paw, filled with pension checks.
     Why the hell would Mary Whitcomb write me now, so many years after we split? And if Rosie couldn't hold me down, who could?
     "What you rubbing your head for?" she said. "You ain't thinking. You already decided."
She traipsed past me to the bedroom and left the door open. She was right: I'd already decided. I opened the atlas and traced a line to San Diego.
     "Get in here," she called from the bedroom. "You ain't leaving without giving me some sex."
     A few seconds later, she pancaked me. She came down in every direction, mountains of skin overlooking the sunlit valley below. She wrapped that nightgown around my wrists, and before I could escape, she had me tied me to the bedpost.
     "Where you going now?"
     With all her shrieking and bellowing, I was glad we had no neighbors.
     "Bring it, Jesus, bring it."
     It was a geometry problem gone awry, a hundred shapes of flesh, blobs that hung in the air, cellulite satellites. All the while I was thinking about what I should pack, why I was going, and what would happen when I arrived.
     "What the hell you ruminating about?" she said, slapping my jaw like an irate mother at the shopping mall.
     "Sorry."
     Usually with Rosie, I got so far into her that I practically became her, wondering more what it felt like to be her than worried about my own pleasure. I had a second sense that way, and my girlfriends always told me I wasn't like other guys when it came to sex. To me, it was intuition, but that was lost on me now. For all her flailing, Rosie might as well have been alone. I had allowed myself to be taken outside of her, a patient on a stretcher rolled into an ambulance, only I suspected the ambulance wasn't going to the hospital; maybe the mental institute. Somehow, I was driving at the same time I rode in back.
     She rolled off, not bothering to untie me. "Fuck it, I'm done."
     "You think," I said, "you might let me loose?"
     "Oh, I'm cutting you loose, Tom. I might be here when you get back, might not. Don't worry, I'll leave the fake wood paneling and your shag rug carpet and your piece of shit TV and your goddamn laptop computer. All I need's my books."
     "Maybe you should have married a black guy, Rosie. Culturally, I mean."
     "What'd I just get done telling you not five minutes ago, Uncle Tom?"
     "Listen, I'm white as an albino."
     "Al who? Those books tell me about myself. They got nothing to do with you."
     "Come on," I said, "untie me."
     "Only if you kneel down and pray with me."
     "You know I don't pray."
     "Then you better start. Get down on your knees like a good boy, else I'll call your mother."
     She undid the tent that bound me to the bedposts and pulled it over her head, staking two corners on her breasts and the other two on her double-wide ankles. We spun off the bed and knelt.
     Goddamn it, Jesus, you bring this dumb motherfucker back better than he left. I don't got much more time in life to waste on this stupid son of a bitch, so if you give a good goddamn what happens to old Rosie, you better set to action, Lord."
     My hands were crossed, but even as a stalwart agnostic, I was afraid to finish that prayer.
     "Well?" she said.
     "Amen," I mumbled.
     "Goddamn right, amen. Now get your ass out of here. I want the whole bed tonight. I'm gonna sleep you off, and when I wake up, you better be gone. Don't come back 'til you're done being a private dick."



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