Chagrin River Review Issue 1 Read online

  Maybe Mort understands The Shop and Shoot better than I do. Maybe he should start practicing the Guidelines. Anyway, I take Mort’s advice. But Luke is still on my mind as I practice that night. I know he’s on my mind because I do something I’ve never done before. It’s right after I say, ‘The most important Guideline is that everyone must carry a gun.’ I hold my fingers like a gun and point it at the mirror, at my reflection. At me. That’s when it comes to me.

  *****

  My meeting with Mr. Watsom goes well. He likes the idea of a suicide target. He says he might even create a High Taboo category for it. I suggest that we use the I.D. photos. Those images could be blown up and applied to the body of the appropriate target—GM, Latin Female, whatever. Then, if a person went into the High Taboo category, up would come a target of him or her. What a rush, I told Mr. Watsom it would be, to see one’s face come up on a target. ‘It’s the ultimate Shop and Shoot experience.’

  I get so excited that my mind starts working really fast, and I suggest that we could even have self-targets appear in The Shop section, maybe in the dressing rooms when people are trying on things that don’t fit. He laughs at that one, says it’s brilliant. He says he loves a Buddy who is always thinking, and clearly, I am thinking. He tells me to brush up on my Guidelines because an opening for Master Buddy will be coming up, and he wants me to be ready. Ready, I’ll be. ‘Welcome to The Shop and Shoot.’

  James B. De Monte

  Tiendas Latinas

  Go to a Latin corner store in eastern Ohio and understand the other patrons are Guatemalan, not Mexican like the store owner and certainly not Italian like you. Buy a glass bottle of Pepsi, since you can’t find them like that anymore. Consider that someone with your same blood might have busted one like it over a scab’s head some decades past and understand that the Guatemalans at the chicken farm are organizing today. Imagine the bottle’s writing were in Sicilian. Wonder if there’s still a deposit on these; that’s what your grandfather might have wondered had he lived to enter Bodega Mexicana. Ask the clerk, ¿Puedo a practicar Español? When he responds, Can I practice my English? continue in your first language. Tell him that you enjoy his store; that you’re reminded of other import stores in coal towns nearby that have been there half a century and are run by very old men; that Eastside Imports is operated by a Greek and that the original owner, a paesan of your grandfather who had a name like Salvatore or Gian Mario or Carmine, was imprisoned for killing a man with a pickaxe; say, That man had it coming. Try telling him all that in Spanish: Las tiendas de importación. . . Notice how he minds his store and not your stressed syllables. A woman comes and points to phone cards. ¿Guatemala? the clerk asks her, grabbing a card. Gracias. When she walks to las frutas, he tells you hers is really a Mayan tongue. Lock eyes with Pope Benedict, against the wall beside the lotto tickets. Try again. ¿Eres Católico? Obviously, Sí. Ask, ¿Es la otra gente Latina aquí Católica también? and then try to remember the last time you’ve held a rosary or confessed your sins or even genuflected. When he shrugs, drink from your bottle and decide whether or not his was an English or a Spanish shrug. A lot have become Evangelical, he finally says. Palm a soccer ball at the front and ask about deportes, if he plays them. This time his No will be plain American-English. Start to exit and see the Mayan woman’s little girls, probably four and three and with names like Rosa or Mariana or Liliana, pull on their mother’s dress and point to dulces. Bend, smile, and say Hola, waving your fingers. Watch them turn away back into their mother, her pallet of a face not cracked. Leave and finish what’s left of the Pepsi, still searching for something forever gone, looking off beyond dead coal hills in the distance.

  Jéanpaul Ferro

  You Get So Alone At Times It Just Makes Sense

  The house sat in the middle of a tall grove of white pine in Western Coventry, Rhode Island. Looking beyond the porch you could see the surface of the pond down below the hill. In the summer months the water would turn this perpetual blue color. In wintertime it would turn a blackish-gray, and then white as the surface froze on very cold Rhode Island nights.

  The dog had been missing for three days now. This particular dog had never left the eight acres of the property before. Phil Alden inherited this land from his father—Alston Alden. It had gone on being passed from Alden to Alden since the mid-1650’s when an Alden, whose father supposedly came over on the Mayflower, had bought the rights to the land from the Narragansett Indian tribe. Now it was three hundred and fifty-six years later and Phil Alden was still in Rhode Island, and he couldn’t find his son’s missing dog.

  Phil walked the property looking for the little ginger-colored Pekingese. The eight acres was a giant tree-filled peninsula along the middle of Johnson’s Pond. Black mirror-like pools surrounded the peninsula on three sides, white pine filling in the center, and Phil’s little red cabin sat out back. He let his older brother use part of one acre to store their father’s old Bermuda sloop. On another acre Phil let his brother warehouse his ’69 Dodge Charger, working on it and covering it over once in a while with a makeshift garage of plastic and boards.

  Phil walked quietly around the yard, gently clapping his hands and clicking his tongue to try and call out for the dog. It was still late winter and half the pond was still frozen. Here and there sat small white islands, either floating in the middle of the pond or jutting out along the edge of the shore. Phil didn’t want Brian, his four-year old, to hear him looking for his Pekingese. They had already lost one dog to the ice—a beautiful Belgian Shepard who had fallen through late last year.

  He began to look everywhere for the dog now—up on the old sloop, in back of the summer fireplace, beneath the dock that he had dragged up on land back in November. He had to get down on his stomach atop frozen muddied footprints in order to look under the Dodge.

  “Where are you?” Phil half-whispered to himself.

  He got up and walked toward the back of his cabin.

  He gently squeezed his head in between the oil tank and the back of the wall where his bedroom was on the other side. When he looked under the tank there was nothing there but frozen earth.

  Three years earlier they had bought the Pekingese to keep the Belgian Shepard company. Phil’s wife, Brenda, had dubbed the little dog Gait, because he was always escaping from his pen.

  “Where are you? Gait! Get over here!” Phil yelled now. “Where are you, boy? Come on! Get over here!”

  Phil stood there and looked around. The pond and the surrounding woods went quiet in a winter stillness. Phil kicked his boots back and forth over the frozen ground just to hear a sound. He had a bad feeling inside. This is all my fault, he thought. Three days earlier the dog had dashed out the door as Phil went for his morning walk. The dog escaped outside, and Phil took his walk, and he thought the darn thing would come back on its own.

  He had to search along the edge of the rocky beach now. He wanted to see if he could find any trace of Gait at all.

  He walked for a good half hour around all the small coves, checking every neighbor’s yard, the old chicken coup someone kept in the woods, inside the old ‘54 Buick that had been abandoned along the shore for years. Phil mustered up some audacity and even walked over to the garage of that yuppie couple—the ones who always had the loud 4th of July parties.

  He listened with his ear against the garage door.

  …But there was no Gait to be found.

  Finally, he decided to head on back home, going up to the main road just to have a look around up there to be sure.

  He stood in the breakdown lane and looked up and down the road. There wasn’t a soul in either direction; only the oak trees and the leafy forest floor on either side of the road. He waited a moment, took a deep breath, and then headed back toward the cabin.

  When he walked through the front door he saw his wife standing there.

  Brenda Alden stood at the kitchen sink still cleaning the plates from breakfast. Her sleek lon
g hair was pulled straight back and shifted in brown bursts behind her every time she moved with a dish in her hand. Phil noticed the creases in her forehead and the tips of her ears that were burning red coming out of her brown hair. She had the same look on her pretty face that his mother would get when she would be mad at him when he was a boy.

  “No sign of him, huh?” Brenda asked.

  Phil looked at his son who was at the kitchen table playing with a toy Hot Wheels car. He reached over to his wife and put his arm around her from behind, so that it rested around her stomach. He could smell the sweet redolence of bacon, sweat, and coconut oil on her.

  “I’ll find him,” Phil whispered in her ear.

  “Maybe we can get another dog,” Brenda said, and there was a kind of resignation in her voice.

  The melodious sounds of their boy playing with his toy car made them look at one another.

  And then came this hurried knocking on the cabin door.

  Phil kissed his wife and went over to the door. He slid the little orange curtain back from its window and he looked outside.

  “It’s your darn brother,” he said to his wife. “I guess Frankie is slumming on this side of the pond again.”

  Phil opened the door and waited for his brother-in-law to say something.

  But his brother-in-law kept trying to look past Phil into the kitchen. “Sis?” Frankie yelled. “Are you in there?”

  “What is it?” Phil asked. “If you need money… Look, this isn’t a good time. I’m on vacation for two weeks.”

  “No, I don’t need no money,” Frankie said. He looked more nervous than usual. “I saw that fire in the port of Providence last week. Were you working that night?”

  “No. I was off,” he said. “But that was a big one.”

  “Yeah,” Frankie said. He jerked his head like he wanted Phil to see something in back of him. “I gotta show you something outside.”

  “What’s is it?”

  Frankie jerked his head backward again like Phil should be looking at something behind him.

  Phil had a bad feeling about this now. The two of them had gone to high school together, and they had once been in the same gym class. Phil realized that his brother-in-law had that same look when he would get the basketball passed to him and he would have to shoot and miss in front of everyone.

  He put his arm around his brother-in-law.

  “Are you alright?” Phil asked.

  “No. Come outside!” Frankie said a little bit more annoyed now. “Come outside!” He gestured like he was about to hitch a ride. “Outside!” he said again.

  Phil looked back at his wife who was still standing there in the kitchen. She shrugged, and so Phil stepped out onto the porch and closed the door to the cabin behind him.

  “Look, Frankie, I told you: We don’t have anymore money to let you borrow. We’re not a bank.”

  Frankie shook his head no, pointing out to the ice that went from the edge of the beach along the side of the yard out about a hundred feet into the water.

  “I don’t want any money!” Frankie insisted, and his hand pointed out to a rose-colored object that was sitting there beneath the ice out in the middle of the pond.

  “Out there! That!” Frankie said.

  Phil moaned as soon as he saw it. “Oh, crap!”

  He immediately looked back and saw Brenda who was watching him from the kitchen window. He nodded toward the ice that was just off shore. He could see the look on her face change. A second later she completely disappeared out of sight.

  “Oh, no,” Phil said thinking out loud.

  He looked at the frozen ground everywhere, and then off at his father’s old sloop in the yard, and then back at the tall white pines at the center of the property. “We’ll get him out!” Phil said.

  He walked over to his pickup and got out the only chainsaw he owned.

  “What are you doing?” Frankie asked. He nervously rubbed the back of his head and began to breathe through his mouth like he was sick.

  Phil backed up from his pickup, shook the chainsaw to see if there were any gas, and then nodded that he was ready.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Phil walked over to the edge of the pond with his brother-in-law in tow.

  He took a test step out onto the ice before he stood on it with all his weight.

  He lurched up and down on the ice with one foot.

  “We’re gonna walk out there?” Frankie chirped.

  “Well, I am,” Phil insisted, kicking at the ice. “It seems pretty solid now.”

  As the two of them began to walk out onto the pond, Phil saw the frozen waves going outward atop the ice where the dog lie beneath. He carefully started the chainsaw with one pull, laid the blade down on the ice where his dog was, and in about fifteen minutes he cut out a frozen, solid block with Gait completely frozen inside of that.

  The two men slid the ice coffin across the frozen pond until they got it all the way to the beach, where Phil struggled and then picked it up all at once and carried it across the yard over to the back of his pickup. He laid it up onto the open hatch, slide it inside, and shut the back of the pickup so no one could see.

  He walked around the side of the truck and looked back up at the cabin.

  When everything seemed clear, he turned back around and went to shake his brother-in-law’s hand.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Phil said. “How ‘bout some coffee?”

  Frankie nodded his head no. He began to blow into his hands with his mouth. He smiled.

  “You don’t happen to have a twenty on you … do you?” he asked.

  Phil let out a breath, rubbed his cheek with his hand, and he reluctantly reached down into his pants pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.

  “This better not be for Foxwoods!” he told his brother-in-law.

  “I haven’t gone to the casino in three weeks!”

  “Sure you haven’t,” Phil said, and he quietly handed his brother-in-law the twenty and went back up to the cabin to check on his family.

  Inside, he found his wife and son sitting together on the couch in front of the fireplace.

  Phil was all hot in the face now. He went over and kneeled down in front of his four-year old.

  “I need to tell you something,” he said to him. He gently took his son’s hands and looked him straight in the eyes. “There are times when God wants us to be strong.” He nodded his head and tried to keep his composure. “You see, Gait, ran off the other day, and, I think, God wanted our little dog to keep him company at night. And now Gait has to be up in heaven with God from now on.”

  Phil watched as a troubled look came right up into the boy’s face.

  “Why did God want my doggie?” the boy asked. “I don’t want God to have him.”

  The little boy slipped out of his father’s grasp and ran down the hall. He cried all the way to his bedroom, and then they heard him crying even louder as he shut the bedroom door behind himself.

  “Should I go after him?” Brenda asked.

  Phil watched her lean back on the side of the couch and look down the hallway.

  “No. I don’t know,” he said to her. He hesitated, and then said: “Maybe not. I guess he’s got to learn. He’s got to learn about life sometime … no?”

  Three long days passed. Three long days with waves crashing to shore. The boy refused to eat or drink or sleep, and he kept going on like this. His parents never saw him act this way before. It was only a day after the other dog had died that he was back to normal. Phil tried to listen to his wife when she explained how it was their responsibility to protect the boy. They would always know better than he would. He should grow up innocent. This is what their parents had done for them, and their parents before that.

  On the fourth day of the waves the very appearance of the boy began to change. Phil noticed his face becoming ashen, and he refused to get out of bed, and he felt hot on the forehead and neck like he was sick.

&nbs
p; The family had been using the same local pediatrician since the day Brian was born. Everyone in town with a kid went to Doctor Gildon. Unfortunately for the doctor he was enlisted in the Ready Reserve and there was a war going on in Iraq now. At fifty-one years of age he was called up to active duty, and with a stiff upper lip he shipped out to serve his one-year in Baghdad.

  Doctor Belliard was a close personal friend of Doctor Gildon. Being that they had been friends since med-school, the former took over the latter’s practice for him; and the Alden’s had to call Doctor Belliard to look after their son.

  When Phil called the doctor, his receptionist explained that the doctor usually didn’t make house calls. Phil used his I’m with the fire department card for the first time and the receptionist told him that the doctor would come as soon as he could.

  Doctor Belliard was an older looking man compared to his friend, Doctor Gildon. Doctor Belliard had white hair with patches of yellow that may have been blond at one time. He had a bulbous nose, a bushy, white mustache, and a face scarred with the pockmarks of severe childhood acne.

  Doctor Belliard sat in the bedroom with the boy for over an hour. Phil paced back and forth in the living room while Brenda kept trying to reassure him.

  “I buried him,” Phil said, motioning his arms like he was holding a shovel. “He melted in the back of the truck and I found some soft ground.”

  “That’s good,” Brenda whispered.

  The sound of the doctor’s gentle voice could be heard from the living room now.

  When Doctor Belliard finally came out of the bedroom he was holding the boy who was sobbing with tears coming down his face. The doctor gently handed the boy over to his mother who took him and wrapped him up in her arms.

  “He’s going to eat something now,” Doctor Belliard promised.

  Phil watched his wife stroke their little son on the back while he cried violently against her breast. “It’s alright now,” she whispered; and the boy began to sob even harder.

  “What is it?” Phil asked. “Is he alright? Is he going to be sick? Is everything going to be okay?”

  Doctor Belliard walked over to the kitchen sink and carefully washed his hands with some soap and water. When he was done, he turned and addressed the parents, drying his hands with a paper towel as he spoke.