Sextillions of Infidels - Barry Rachin (best story books to read TXT) 📗

this would do just fine - a sublimely perfect end to what might have been a catastrophic evening. Collecting the coffee mugs, her hostess shuffled into the kitchen and began rinsing out the last few dishes, while Hazel spread the sleeping bag on the floor. Marla was humming to herself in the kitchen, a James Taylor song from the late sixties, but then the impromptu music died away and the woman began speaking in a low-keyed, meditative monologue.

"What was that?" Hazel approached and stood in the doorway.

Marla was storing cutlery in the drawer. "I was saying how up here in the boondocks the neighbors don't give a rat's ass about proper etiquette. They'll stop by any time day or night to chew the fat or just to make sure you're doing okay."

"Morris, he's a good one for that," Marla continued in rambling fashion. Only now did Hazel notice the wispy grin curling up the side of the older woman's mouth. "He just shows up in the middle of the night unannounced with no clear-cut agenda." The woman gestured with a flick of her head at the window over the sink. Thirty feet away in the back yard stood a full-grown, bull moose. A full moon in a cloudless sky threw down just enough light to reveal the six-foot rack of antlers and grizzled, elongated muzzle.

"Morris forages vegetation from a pond on the far side of the hill and wanders over here most nights after supper." She dried the pot that she used to steam the rice, placing it on a shelf in one of the lower cabinets.

Ten Minutes later, there was a scratching at the back door and Marla let the cat back in for the night. Killing the lights, she went into the bedroom and changed into pajamas. "Do you like poetry?" Hazel could see the woman's bulky figure in shadowy silhouette. The countryside had gone completely silent locked in winter's icy grip.

"I guess so." Hazel wasn't much of a reader. A steady diet of Shakespeare, Beowulf and Chaucer through middle school had pretty much destroyed her love of literature.

"I was never big on the modern poets," Marla rambled on. "Merrill, Ashcroft, Berryman… they all left me flat. I could never make much sense of their mindless prattle. That ain't poetry, it's just literary mush." The woman fell silent and, as a guest in the home, Hazel wasn't sure whether she was obliged to add something to further the conversation. Problem was, she wasn't at all familiar with any of the poets her host had mentioned. "Now Robert Frost - there was a man with talent and a keen sense of the human predicament."

"We studied The Road Not Taken in school last year," Hazel offered.

"And Theodore Roethke - now there was another first class poet." Marla, who was resting on the arm of the sofa, bent over and adjusted the blanket up around Jorani's shoulders. The girl moaned - more like a deep sigh of contentment - shifting over on her side away from the conversation. "Did you know his family owned a greenhouse and nursery business?"

"I wasn't aware of that." Hazel had no idea who Theodore Roethke was. The girl was sleepy and could only just barely follow the meandering thread of Marla's random musings.

"Well anyway, many of the themes in his poems were dredged up from his youth working with the plants in the greenhouse, gathering moss for cemetery baskets, growing plants from seed, that sort of earthy reminiscence."

Hazel yawned. "That's so very sweet!" Her eyes were closed, the breath coming in shallow puffs. In the corner near the heater, the cat was cleaning itself, settling in for the night.
"A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."

"How's that?" The strange fragment momentarily jolted Hazel back to consciousness.

"It's a fragment of a Whitman poem," Marla clarified. "Probably from Leaves of Grass, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. All that talk about Roethke reminded me of it." Marla rose and drifted away in the direction of her bedroom. "Doesn't matter all that much, if we're talking mice, moose, or Cambodian girls with doting parents and eating disorders - they're all equally precious in their own right."

Finished with her physical hygiene, the tabby rested her head on her paws. "What about me?" Hazel blustered.

"Ditto," Marla added curtly, "on the infidels!"


In the morning, Hazel awoke to the sound of a cell phone twittering. In the bedroom, Marla was alternately talking softly and laughing at some raunchy humor. She rolled over in the sleeping bag. Jorani was still dead to the world. A rooster began crowing. A half hour passed and Marla, dressed in flannel PJ's, came into the room. "Car's fixed."

"What?"

"Duane has one of those T-shaped tire irons with multiple socket settings. He stripped the flat tire earlier this morning and replaced it with the spare. Even ran the flat down to the garage where they cemented a rubber plug in the puncture hole." Jorani was wide awake now and sitting up on the couch. "A roofing nail… that's what caused the entire hullabaloo. A stupid, half-inch roofing nail." Marla drifted toward the kitchen. "I'm fixing breakfast. Nothing fancy just buckwheat pancakes and coffee, if you girls care to join me."

"What’s buckwheat?" Jorani whispered.

"A special flower mixed with buttermilk." Hazel told her about Morris.

"A wild moose and you couldn't be bothered to wake me!"

"You were snoring… embarrassingly loud." Hazel threw a bucket of cold water on her indignation. "But more to the point, the car's fixed and everything is back to normal."

Well, not exactly. My parents are getting divorced and yours will manacle you to the radiator in the tenement basement when they find out what we did this weekend.

"We ought to leave money for the tire," Jorani said reaching for her wallet.

"That's already been settled," Marla clarified. She cracked an egg in a bowl of flour moistened with milk and a tablespoon of vegetable oil, mixing the ingredients with a metal whisk. "Duane says he'll take payment in free meals over the next month along with certain sexual gratuities to be named at a later date."


At eleven-thirty after retrieving the patched tire, the girls were back on the road headed south. "You realize something very special happened back there?"

"I may be a crybaby, but I'm not an idiot," the Asian girl replied softly.

"At breakfast you ate three helpings of pancackes."

"I was hungry."

"You were hungry last night," Hazel corrected. "Today you were just a glutton."

Jorani smirked and licked her lips. "They were so good!" Marla peppered the pancake batter with wild blueberries picked throughout the summer from bushes in back of the cottage. The fruit was packed away in cellophane bags in the freezer and rationed as special treats during the frigid winter months. An hour later as they came up on the Portland exit, Jorani cleared her throat. "There's a rest area with a Dunkin' Donuts three miles down from here."

"How would you know??"

"I noticed it on the way up."

Hazel gawked at her friend. "It was pitch-dark when we passed through this section of highway last night, coming from the opposite direction."

"I saw it all the same. Maybe we could…"

"Yes, it's a long ride home," Hazel depressed her directional and shifted over to the far right-hand lane, "and there's no reason why we can't take a brief break."

Once seated in the restaurant, Hazel blurted, "A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."

"Sex what?"

"It's from a Whitman poem. With her free hand, Hazel caressed her friend's face. "Your Cambodian nose is just fine."

"What's my stupid nose got to do with a mouse or whatever you're prattling about?"

"Marla says not to worry because we're all damaged goods."

"She said that?"

Hazel sipped at her cinnamon cappuccino. "Well, not exactly, but some sweetheart of a guy is gonna go bonkers over Jorani, the radiant jewel, one of these days, and it will be sort of like Duane and Marla."

"That weird Whitman poem," Jorani's eyes clouded over. "Say it again."

"A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."

"Are you going to finish that apple cheese Danish?" Jorani indicated a half-eaten pastry that her friend had pushed to one side with the soiled napkins."

"Why do you ask?"

"No reason, in particular."


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Publication Date: 01-10-2011

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