Settlement

Untitled Eastern Project

We went to the Antique Mall to buy buffalo teeth. The old women at the counter were watching an internet video showing a blond child rolling in the grass with a golden retriever. The women’s eyes were wet behind their glasses. An old man sat on a stool bent hunched over his cane keeping time with the tip to a windup toy marching across the glass tabletop. When the toy died he hung the cane on his knee, reached out and wound tight the spring and set the drummer to motion again.

He said he collected and repaired barometers. Hundreds of years of pressure. Once he’d had the largest collection in the country but that was all over now. In recent years he’d cut back, sold quite a few, was currently down to just two. One didn’t work but he said he could fix that. It was his business to fix that.

In the video the blond boy had collapsed on the retriever’s belly, dogtongue flopped in the sun. Summer in New Haven. Somewhere on the Cape. The old women wept silently, wrapped teeth in tissue. The old man said he didn’t know any collectors of buffalo parts. Must be a small field, he said. A real tight community. 

We walked to the ocean and swam off to the shipping lanes. A lifeguard paddled out next to us on a surfboard. She sat straddling the board and the waves picked her up and put her down, the clouds huge and white blowing in behind her. A prop plane pulling a banner advertising the Resurrection flew low over the shore. The lifeguard was looking at us. I saw her mouth and it was moving. She was speaking to us. Over the water and the clouds she was speaking to us. The whole time we were in the ocean she was speaking to us. 

Later that afternoon a small hurricane made landfall. People commented on this as they arrived at hotels, looked for parking. At my homeless shelter the power went out. I lay on my bed in the dark and laughed. It was very quiet. I played a game in which the pigs have stolen the eggs and also some strawberries and the birds are very angry. I failed to rescue the eggs but then suddenly I succeeded. I took a shower. When I got out I heard screaming. I looked through the blinds. Flashlights swung from balconies, palm trees sinking into the sky, smoke pouring up over the buildings in the distance. Someone threw a bottle rocket into the swimming pool. 

I dried my hair and walked to the street through the dark complex. A powerline had snapped and mango trees were burning, sheets of flame curling up from the grass, fruit exploding on the vine. 

From the crowd assembled two women began to fight. One said the other didn’t have an ass. This was taken with offense. The one without an ass caught the other in the teeth with a broom handle. They lunged for each other and went to the ground, rolling into the road beside the burning jungle. 

The crowd pushed in around them. It was very hot from the fire and the women’s skin shone slick where they had torn away each other’s clothes. A gang of Haitians whistled and tossed dollar bills, their faces the color of the smoke, the smoke the color of the sky.

I went back to my bed in the dark. I stood in the hallway opening and closing my eyes. I laughed loudly and openly. I remembered the shower and I remembered the ocean. The impossible pressure.

At some point the air began again moving in the vents. I took this as a sign and made arrangements to leave to a restaurant on the beach where we ate hamburgers on the patio and a man mopped rain from the tables.