Jon Udelson

Carthage

I stopped off at the buy-and-sell to unload those boxes of sneakers that ended up in my truck the previous night. Carthage worked there, and I thought I could get a good deal even though he had cheated me before.

The door buzzed, and he waved me and my stacked hand truck in with the manic energy of a man destined for rehab. My god, he could have sold boats with that energy! And I dreamed of what I could do with it myself.

“I can tell you’re feeling great today!” Carthage told me. And would you believe that it made me feel better, even if only for a moment? His salmon-colored polo threw into relief that large freckled forehead, and with his skinny neck he looked like a glittered party balloon ready to pop. He held a slimed-over cup of dip spit that steadily oozed onto the glass gun case in front of him. It looked like that same handleless tea cup he used to bring around everywhere in high school, which I couldn’t believe he hadn’t worn through.

Before the buy-and-sell, this building housed a blood bank. The floors were still the same red vinyl, and if you stared off you could sometimes catch out of the corner of your eye the misty ghosts of rent-payers’ hemoglobin floating all around. But what of the shop now, or the items for sale in the shop? The display room décor belied a sacred site of the animistic, each item in it waiting to glow in the hands of its one true owner. I felt such wonder and touched many of the pans and trumpets and books, but not a single one reacted to me this way.

“Probably can’t give you the price you want, though,” Carthage went on. This change in tone snapped me back, caught me out.

“How do you know?” I asked. Even I heard the whine in my voice, like that of a goner.

“Man, I don’t know any of this stuff of purpose.”

“How much then?”

He told me how much.

“Hey, what’s with that scowl while I’m trying to do you a favor?” Carthage said. “Laws of supply and demand dictate.”

“Laws of what?” I cried. I once truly believed I would go my entire life without someone brandishing such a phrase at me. But now that hope was gone.

“You mean you don’t need any?” I asked.

“I could do you a favor.”

“Yes, yes, please. A favor is all I need.”

“But I can tell from the boxes that the sneakers aren’t in very good shape.”

The truth was I hadn’t even seen them yet. “They could be in better shape,” I said, “yeah.”

Carthage started fidgeting, eager to put his body to use even in this small project of arithmetic, caught as always in the desperate state of unmet desire that was the addict’s verve. “Give me a minute to scratch up some numbers,” he said.

“Anything to stay out of this weather,” I said.

“What weather?” he asked.

Mel walked in from the back room then, his eyes down at the open ledger he held. He flipped a page back as he walked toward us, then he flipped two pages forward and then another page forward after that. Mel had the demeanor and crinkled suit of an injury lawyer, and it seemed like he was always on the move from one devastation to another. Everyone called Mel boss, so the actual boss didn’t need to be called anything at all. I had no illusions about what this place really was.

When he looked up and saw it was me standing there with Carthage, Mel went on doing exactly what had come up front to do. He pushed his glasses up on his head and asked about four grand worth of gold coins Carthage oversaw the store taking ownership of around Christmastime the previous year.

“Sure, sure. Sold them to—” Carthage started. “You know the guy. Wears a hat like the people who do the horses.”

“A jockey’s cap,” said Mel.

Who knew such a thing had a name!

“About three, four months ago,” Carthage said. As he went on, I started to get a feeling. Outside the window the early Spring sky looked as if the Almighty had forgotten to imagine anything of it save the blankness of an awaiting fury.

“He put in a large downpay and has been making steadies since,” he went on. “On time but always at irregular intervals for him. Weird, I know, since that guy’s usually like clockwork.”

Intervals? Downpays? Steadies? Never did I learn from all my years of watching movies and TV shows that there were such intricate details of pawnshop dealings. There they were places of cash and bats, and could you believe redemption? The world I had assumed real seemed replaced by one identical to it but alien to me.

“Must be why I can’t find the four grand on here,” said Mel. “Can you show me?”

“Sure, let me handle this guy first,” Carthage said, referring to me. “Getting more of those sneakers that came in this morning. For a steal,” he added, despite me being right there. “I’ll highlight the payments if you want to leave the ledger.”

But Mel told Carthage he had to be off. Just got a call that an associate of his had been cut nearly in half. Could Carthage quickly show him?

“I could do that,” Carthage said. He set down his dip cup on the glass case in front of him and stepped out from behind the counter and took the ledger from Mel. The motion came off deft and gentle, somehow subservient. He opened the book toward its middle, then flipped multiple pages back several times, licking his finger to do so. “Here,” he said. “At the end of January, dude paid nine hundred. See?” Mel rose to his tiptoes to reconcile with the angle at which Carthage held the ledger and said he did, but I had my doubts.

Carthage leaned his weight forward, toward the ledger he held at arm’s length now, and backed off Mel a few steps. He then leaned backward and slightly turned his head to the window and took a short, rearward step toward the door. “You two hear that?” he said.

“Hear what?” said Mel.

“I do!” I said. Which was true, but I didn’t think Carthage or Mel could hear it. Inside my head it sounded as if hail had started to fall on every car in the parking lot. The sky was suddenly everywhere, mottled metallic, heavy and godful and crashing down on us without concern.

“And here’s the payment in early Feb for five more,” Carthage said, turning his attention back to the ledger. He motioned as if to step forward again, which made me and Mel lean back, but then moved in the opposite direction as he continued flipping through the pages. “What the hell is that?” He looked over his shoulder as if he too were looking for the source of the hail.

“I don’t know,” I said, but it was something alright. “You think it’s coming this way?” I was getting nervous.

“Sounds like a gigantic meat grinder,” Carthage said.

“It does, it does—exactly!” I yelled. My knees weakened and I began to hyperventilate, but only a little bit.

“I don’t hear anything,” said Mel.

Carthage turned back around to look through the ledger some more. “Then a couple of weeks later, another—” But he cut himself off when he backed up into the front door, unlocked for all who exit. The bell at the top chimed. Under the chime a silence, and in the thrall of it we stood silent too. And I knew what would happen next.

Carthage streamed a thick rope of brown muck from what must have been eight feet out right into Mel’s face. How he held all that liquid in his mouth and talked so clearly I’ve never figured. He then spun hard on his heel and smacked open the door with the palm of one hand and the flat of the ledger in his other and stumbled forward into a dead sprint. I had only ever seen this maneuver in cartoons. That’s how it looked to me at the time, and even how I remember it now—Carthage’s ears as an animated hedgehog’s, his legs blurry wheels churning dust.

I had to leave the stolen shoes in the shop. Piles of them in the display room, and even more packed ceiling-high in the back. Their retail price aside, I thought of those shoes wanting to be possessed of something or by someone. And as I thought of them I began to long—in this apparitional time, in this time of barely being there—for my mind to warp back to when I was alive but not yet human. Floating alone in the darkness, without evidence of a universe. Epicentral in my solitude and far, far removed from creation. And then if I never entered that light outside, how would I know I missed out on anything at all?

In the passenger seat of my truck, Mel wriggled in pain, still rubbing at his eyes, gooey and inflamed, ordering me where to go. On Mel’s command I chased Carthage because I had no say in the matter. But to tell you the truth, I tried to see this as my opportunity to be of use to a man like him. Mel needed the ledger back because it was the only true accounting of the shop, and Carthage needed it gone because it was the only evidence of his golden theft.

“About the price of those sneakers,” I started.

But Mel only turned his eyes upwards and asked, “How did this end up being my life?” Though he didn’t ask it to me.

The clouds vaporized on the drive and the twilit sky sang. I didn’t know if we’d be early or late, and I also didn’t know for what. As we moved over twisting roads, closer and closer to our destination, it was as if I saw us coming from Carthage’s driveway, small in the distance at first but growing larger.

“You’ll have my back when we get there,” said Mel.

“I will,” I told him. And I really wanted to mean it.

We pulled into the driveway as Carthage was tossing a go bag into his hatchback. Mel stepped out of my truck while it still rolled and used the momentum to tackle Carthage to the ground, and the two men got to wrestling. I couldn’t tell which, but one of them produced a knife and stabbed the other in the belly, and I gassed it in reverse until the violence became a tiny play with red string. Turning the wheel a hard right, I almost backed over a woman tending her rain garden, truly the most beautiful I’d ever seen. Foxglove stood high in the center of it all, priding itself as the center of a strange solar system. A cluster of dragonflies orbited around it, then blinked out of existence. I still have dreams of that woman—her face, her flowers—but I’ve never been back to that block since.

The first time I met Carthage he came up to me senior year and asked me to slip an answer key into the backpack of our would-be valedictorian. He paid me in a gas station six pack, and I later heard she dove headfirst into amphetamines after getting suspended and losing her scholarship. I think she and Carthage were competing for the same math award, or maybe he just wanted to get over on someone for the sake of it. After that it seemed like I saw him around everywhere. Always leaning against the far wall at whatever metal show I was at, or sitting alone at the other end of the bowling alley dosing by himself. Though from his perspective, I guess I did the same.

I tell you this so you understand that no fragment of me feels wrong saying how impressed I was with Carthage in that moment of his flight. First for his quick ingenuity with that distracting story, and then with the ledger, and finally for dipping his entire life so he’d have something to spit when the time came. But most of all I admired him for his lack of hesitation to run away from the stolen life we all lived. I think a lot of us felt that similar haunting of guilt then, even in those rare times when we’d done nothing wrong other being caught in a body and time and world.

I didn’t go home that night like I thought I would and instead drove back to the buy-and-sell. When Mel was first writhing on the floor, dip spit burning through his corneas, I grabbed out of otherworldly instinct the magnetic door buzzer from behind the counter in case I needed to get back inside. The clouds had gathered again by the time I returned, and it looked as if the hail I heard in my head fell upon that place and that place alone. Though maybe it wasn’t hail at all but white balls of hard oblivion dotting out the material world.

In my head it fell louder and bigger as I loaded into my truck the boxes of sneakers I had tried to sell not an hour before. Then I went into the back room to start loading up the rest. Inside the buy-and-sell every item glowed for itself and itself alone, without care of the abyss forming right beyond its walls. Or perhaps they didn’t glow, and didn’t need to either. One day we’d be absolved from it all, I knew, and we’d abandon ourselves and float away through an open door to a different dimension of physics. As if by sutures our fractures would heal and the space between all of us would close, and if you searched for someone you’d find everyone else too. This comforted me, but it wouldn’t stop me. Because that day would be a long way off, and none of us had yet learned back then how to want for nothing and just wait.

END

Jon Udelson’s fiction has appeared in Action-Spectacle, Juked, Ampersand Review, Baltimore Review, and Fiction Magazine, among others. He is the author of Arabic Tattoos (Mark Batty Publisher) and co-editor of Seeking Our Places (Peter Lang, forthcoming), a collection on creative writing research. Jon is an Associate Professor of English at Shenandoah University and lives in Winchester, VA with his wife, cat, and greyhound. (P.S. For real, there was a neti pot in this story before I cut it!)