From the anthology
CONFESSIONS OF A VELOUR-SHIRTED MAN
ISBN: 978-0-557-71899-3
copyright © 2010 by Stuart Connelly
All rights reserved.
Smashwords Edition
First published by
AMALGAMATED PRESS
555 59th Street
New York, NY 10019
Cover design by Topeka
Red Coyote Weekend
by Stuart Connelly
Michael Anderson regarded his pool table. He squatted, forearms bracketing one of the side pockets, and rolled the pink three-ball against the far bumper. It came back at a slight angle to kiss the nine—click.
“It ought to work,” he said as he stood up. Both knees popped. Michael padded over to the window and looked out. The snow was still piling up, and he was content just to watch it for a few minutes. Then he snapped out of it. Back to work, he told himself. If not, he’d surely go back to the television and get pulled into the news coverage for who knew how long. President Bush had started the Gulf War only the previous day, and Michael was the kind of writer (like many) who was a news junkie, as well as the kind of writer (like all) who was a procrastinator. Awful combination at wartime.
As he headed to his home office, he noticed a slow car rolling to a stop on Lakeland Road, directly in front of the house. It had New Jersey plates. Two middle-aged women got out and talked at the end of Michael’s driveway, huddled together like school children. This was a rarity—since moving to Carbontown, Michael could count the number of literary fans who had found him on one hand.
The women worked their way up the snow-covered walk and rang the doorbell. Michael considered slipping a pair of shoes on, then decided it wasn’t worth the effort. What you see is what you get, ladies. He went to the foyer in his socks and opened the door.
“Mr. Anderson?” the darker-haired woman asked.
Michael nodded.
The woman thrust a copy of his latest book, Tarnish, into his hand. “Would you mind?”
“Not at all.” Michael flipped the book open to the dedication page—to Sharon, Who Showed Me. He slipped a pen out of his shirt pocket. He looked at the woman. “You are?”
“Monica. Genene and I love your work, Mr. Anderson.” The other woman, Genene, he supposed, nodded in agreement.
“Thank you, ladies. You must, coming all the way out here in this weather to see me.” He scrawled out his signature as he half-listened to Monica. She said something about a cousin she was visiting in town.
Michael looked up from the book. “It’s real cold out here. Would you like to come in for a little while. I could put some tea on, or…”
“Oh, we couldn’t put you to any trouble,” Genene said loudly.
“No trouble. To tell you the truth, I could use the company.”
Monica looked up at the sky. “We really should go,” she said. “You know, the storm and all.”
“Oh, sure,” Michael said, suddenly embarrassed for inviting the women in. They were fans, and he knew better than to drop his guard in front of fans. “No, yeah, you should get going.”
“Well,” Monica said, “yeah. It was really special meeting you, though, Mr. Anderson. I know, we know, how valuable your time must be.”
“No problem. It was nice meeting you too, Monica. Drive safely, okay.” Michael closed the door on the two women and went back to the empty warmth of his house.
Fans were strange: they wanted to be your best friend, but they were also afraid of you—like you were somehow different than them, somehow better. When he had lived in Boston, it had seemed like his little brownstone was a stop on the Freedom Trail. He was constantly hounded. In fact, it was the fans of his first novel, rather than the money generated by its sales, that had helped Michael decide to move. Carbontown, nestled in Northern Massachusetts, was deep country, and traveling along Lakeland Road, you might come across a house every four miles. If you were looking for civilization, you’d have to go more like fourteen. Michael liked the quiet; it was good for his concentration. He knew going in that writing was lonely work, and he was fine when his wife was around. But with Sharon in Vermont for the weekend, and his Jaguar in the shop, Michael was virtually stranded at the house. He resented the world for that. But at least it explained his odd behavior with the two fans. Wait’ll I tell Murray about it, he thought.
Michael went into his office. He flipped on his word processor, called up a file named “Mouth,” and reread what he had written that morning:
Phil looked up at Cooper as if he were viewing him through a fishtank. The room seemed to throb in and out of focus with his heartbeat. The nitrous oxide was taking effect. “A few of these back teeth look in pretty bad shape,” Cooper said. To Phil, his voice sounded distant, and too deep. “There might be some pain, but nothing you can’t handle.”
Phil closed his eyes. He felt untethered, outside of himself.
“You can handle it, right?” Cooper asked. “You’re brave, Phil, right? You can take a little dental work if you’re brave. A man like you must be brave. Right?”
Phil felt something slither along his arm. It tickled, then stopped. Then the sensation came through the other arm. And was gone again.
“Brave to be screwing another guy’s wife, a friend’s wife.”
Phil opened his eyes and looked down. His arms were tied to the dental chair. “What are you doing, Coop?” he asked thickly. He was talking through the mask, and Cooper could barely hear him. It scarcely mattered, anyway.
“It takes guts to do that to your own dentist, Phil. The least you could’ve done after you started doing Valerie was get yourself another goddamn dentist.” Cooper reached over to the stainless steel tray next to him.
Phil followed Cooper’s hand with his eyes. It came to rest on a ball. It was a pool ball. Cooper’s hand held it very tightly. “What can I say here, Coop?” Phil said drunkenly. “What do you want me to say—I’m sorry? Is that gonna fix things?”
“Open wide,” Cooper said to him, “This might hurt a bit.”
Phil struggled against the ropes at his wrists. And Cooper picked up the pool ball, and pushed it against Phil’s mouth.
“It ought to work,” Michael said again. He turned away from the word processor and went back to the pool table in the den. He picked up the cue ball and studied it closely. It was far from the pure white he would’ve thought. The ball was a dull yellow, like heavy cream that’s gone real, real bad. The polish was flat and the enamel had black hairline cracks running through it. Blue chalkmarks pocked the surface.
Michael hefted it. Not too heavy, he thought, but solid. Very solid. He closed his hand around it, squeezing as hard as he could. Then he let up on the pressure.
He had one rule of writing, one rule that had got him as far as he had gotten—a couple of dozen short stories published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Harper’s, and two best-selling novels. The rule was research. Good solid research, Michael believed, made all the difference in publishing. It ran circles around clever dialogue or fluid exposition. It took precedence over everything except, maybe, meeting a deadline. Michael often thought if more aspiring writers latched on to this secret, he’d be out of a job. There are a lot better writers than me out there, he’d thought before, but not one damn better researcher.
Michael had talked to all the dentists he knew about his current story idea. He was referred to orthodontists, who referred him to ear, nose, and throat specialists. No one could answer this one question: can a pool ball fit in a grown man’s mouth? Michael thought he had the makings of a solid story, but unless he had his question answered, it wouldn’t go anywhere. So, on that lonely and snowy Saturday morning, he was out to discover the answer for himself.
He flexed his mouth, opening it as far as he could, feeling the delicate muscles of his cheeks and jaw pull. When he couldn’t go any wider he slipped the four fingers of his left hand into his mouth and slowly rotated them to the vertical. He groaned as his upper teeth cut into his pinky, but the hand held its ground and Michael’s mouth opened a fraction more.
He stood there, dividing his time between watching the clock tick off the minutes, staring cross-eyed at his fingers (where he could see traces of blood clinging to his wedding band), and watching the snow fall and pile up in front of the window. Michael had put down the cue ball and was massaging the joints and muscles in front of both ears with his right hand.
After a bit, he removed his tingling hand and picked the cue ball back up. It’ll take something to top this stunt, he thought.
Slowly he pressed it to his mouth. It felt cold, dry. He parted his lips just a bit, and the ball found teeth—click.
He pushed and his teeth separated. He pushed harder, forcing the upper and lower teeth into a bizarre race for the poles.
He kept pushing. Silver spots began dancing in front of Michael’s eyes as his teeth crawled to the widest part of the cue ball. Burn-like pain flared through his head.
Then it was in. Just like that, his teeth were on the far side of the halfway mark. Now the pressure was on the inside pushing out, not the other way around.
Michael made a gurgling sound as he struggled to free his tongue from underneath the ball. He got it in all right, but it was a tight fit. His cheeks were puffed out; every one of his teeth was putting incessant pressure on the ball. It completely filled his mouth.
He felt violated, like he was being raped. How, he wondered, must that compare to this? He felt his throat hitch. Oh no you don’t, he thought. You’re not going to throw up until this thing’s out of your mouth. That would be most unwise.
Michael dropped to his knees and put his face in his arms on the rail of the pool table. His stomach rolled over once, then subsided. He reached for the cue ball and felt for the first time just how tiny the sliver of ball still outside his body was.
Then he panicked. He ran into the upstairs bathroom and looked in the mirror. What looked back at him was a freak. His eyes bulged, his cheeks were ballooned. His lips were stretched so tightly across his face that the blood had almost been entirely cut off. They were the color of his skin.
And between those pasty lips sat a long, thin wedge of ivory.
Michael wiped one sweaty hand on his pants and tried to grab the cue ball. It was like trying to open a desk drawer that had lost its handle; a drawer so flush with the desk that you can’t even get a hold of an edge or corner. The best Michael could do with his hands was rotate the ball in place. Just like Missile Command, he thought wildly. When he moved it with his fingers it scraped against his teeth with a squeak and bits of bitter blue chalk flaked onto the back of his tongue.
Michael tried to dig an index finger between the ball and the corner of his lips. The seal was so tight that he couldn’t even get in past the fingernail. A moan came out of his nose.
The phone in his downstairs office rang. He ran to it, and as he pushed the door open he heard his own voice.
“Hi, this is Michael Anderson. I’m either not at home or I’m in the middle of a good fit of inspired writing now. Probably the former. Anyway, leave a message at the tone and I’ll get back to you, okay?”
He stood in front of his desk watching the little LED flash.
Beeeep…
“Hi, Babe,” he heard Sharon’s voice say. “I got to Leslie’s all right. The storm is bad, though. If this keeps up, I may have to stay on here an extra day or two. I don’t want to drive through that again.”
Michael thought about picking up the phone. Oh, he couldn’t talk or anything, but he was pretty sure he could grunt a message across to his wife: something’s wrong, send help. He was too embarrassed to do that. He had a cue ball stuck in his mouth, for Christ sake. He thought it would be best if no one ever found out about it. So embarrassment kept him from picking up the receiver and interrupting his wife’s call—embarrassment, and the fact that, at that time, he had no idea just how bad things were going to get.
“Anyway, have a good weekend. I miss you, Hon. And get that new story done, okay?” He heard the connection go and watched the tiny wheels of the tape machine stop.
The LED winked and winked.
Michael knelt in the back of his walk-in closet, throwing shoes over his shoulders and into the bedroom with both hands. Finally he came out with a monstrous shoehorn. The blade was metal and the handle, easily a yard long, was oak. Embossed in gold down the length of the hand was the legend “GO LONGHORNS!”
Michael sat on the edge of his bed and put the shoehorn against his bottom teeth. He gripped with both hands as far up the neck as he could reach. With a quick snap, he thrust forward. For a split second, the blade hesitated at the seam where the ball and the teeth met, then it disappeared and dug squarely into the soft flesh on the floor of Michael’s mouth.
His body convulsed and pitched itself off the bed. Michael turned his head sideways just in time to prevent the handle from hitting the floor straight on. He stayed on the ground for a while.
He sat backwards on the toilet, crushing half a dozen aspirin to a fine powder on top of the tank. He was using a crystal candlestick.
The severity of his situation had started to hit him in the bedroom. The initial cut hadn’t been so bad. It was after he’d gotten up and tried to pry the ball out that things had gone big league. He had wedged a torn piece of tissue between the cue ball and the shoehorn, and just before he’d blacked out he’d realized that the lever was pushing the thing up towards the roof of his mouth, not forward.
He rolled up a fifty-dollar bill, and stuck the tube in one nostril. More than one way to skin a cat, he thought. He snorted.
His nose protested with fiery pain, and by the time he was done, a thin trail of blood ran from his nostril to his twisted upper lip.
But the aspirin immediately started to diminish the throbbing in his mouth and face.
He went to the bathroom window and looked out. It was still snowing in the darkness. No, he thought, I’m not going anywhere tonight. I’m on my own.
Michael went into his office and sat down at his desk. He picked up the phone and dialed his agent’s home number.
“Hello,” Murray said. Without much hope, Michael made a series of shallow groans into the receiver.
“Who is this?” his agent demanded. Michael replied with more noise. “Jesus Christ. Look, don’t call here again, cocksucker.” Murray hung up.
Oh, this is getting so bad, Michael told himself. Tears started to run down his face. He sat in front of his word processor and cried.
Sometime around midnight Michael came to a conclusion: he had to get a grip on the ball from the front and pull it out. Until then he had been using a push theory, trying to get something (like the hanger he had just tried) behind the ball and forcing it out from there. This technique had caused him to swallow so much blood that he was sure he would throw up by morning.
No, the pull theory was the way to go. Michael stood at the workbench in the back of his empty garage. He picked out the 38-inch bit and stuck it in the drill press. He tightened it up with the chuck key and lowered the drilling platform as far as it would go. Then he dug through the drawers of the workbench until he found a bottle of Elmer’s Wood Glue.
He had decided that in order to get a grip on the cue ball, he would have to anchor something in. When you open a bottle of wine, you don’t pull on the surface of the cork, he reasoned. You use a corkscrew.
Michael’s version of the corkscrew would be this: he’d bore to the center of the ball, then remove the bit from the drill press and glue it into the hole. He would then have something to lock a pair of Vice-Grips onto, or perhaps to tie a rope onto from a doorknob like some kind of crazy Little Rascals tooth-pulling sequence.
He flicked the power button and watched the drill press come to life. After a moment he sat on the stool and arched his back so his head rested on the platform. He felt like he was in a dentist’s chair. Michael centered himself as best as he could, his eyes never leaving the whirling iron needle. He couldn’t swallow in that position. It was that fact rather than any actual bravery that made Michael reach up and pull on the spring-loaded lever. He felt like he was giving a one-armed bandit a spin in slow motion. He followed the bit with his eyes until it disappeared under his nose. He felt it touch down on the cue ball, felt the thing shake violently in his mouth. Then he felt the ball slide sideways, away from the bit, and he felt his head slide with it as the bit skidded across the surface of the ball like a tornado and into his bottom lip.
Then he felt nothing at all.
Michael woke up on the floor of his garage Saturday morning and within moments came to two realizations. The first was that he should’ve picked up the goddamn phone when his wife called. In his dreams that night he had relived the call over and over, standing above the machine, and always deciding to pick up the receiver just as she hung up.
The second discovery he made was that he’d never put on any shoes when he’d come out to the garage. Michael sat up and pulled off one white sock. His foot was numb to his own touch and slightly, ever so slightly bluish.
It must be forty degrees in here, he thought, and that led him to a third realization. His nose was starting to stuff up.
The morning had been quite eventful, and it was almost noon when Michael came back into the garage to find the tin snips. Nearly five hours had passed since he had gotten up and he was astonished that he could still breathe.
In that time he had found his lip torn apart, snow piled up against his front door, almost half a bottle of expired 4-Way Nasal Spray and a flashing red light on his answering machine.
Sharon had called sometime in the early morning. She was glad, and somewhat surprised, she hadn’t woken him. The storm was getting worse, she said. She might not make it back until Monday. Michael kept replaying the message—a high-pitched squeal followed by “Hi, Hon. Welcome to the land of the living”—as if he expected it to change.
He spent some time doing that and a little time wrapping up tight and walking out the front door, determined to find help. He had turned around when he’d found that he couldn’t see his house from the end of his own driveway in the blizzard.
Mostly he had sat in the kitchen carefully breathing through his nose, waiting until spots pulsed at the edge of his vision before taking another shot of the precious decongestant.
At eleven, driven by hunger and thirst, he had grabbed a carton of orange juice and walked upstairs to the bathroom. He had stripped down and climbed into the tub. Tilting his head back, he had poured the juice onto the cue ball with one hand and spun the ball with the other, carrying a thin layer of the liquid to his waiting tongue. When it was all done, Michael had spilled about three-quarters of it on himself, but as he hosed his body off, the little nutrition he’d gathered rekindled the fires at nerves in his face that had burned down to embers. His nose had been too close to closing to try snorting anymore aspirin.
Now, as he hunted around for the tin snips, Michael wondered if he’d used the 4-Way sparingly enough. It doesn’t matter, he thought. If you’d used half as much, you still would’ve run out before your wife came home. And you’re not getting any better.
He thought of his college friend Jay, who had introduced him to the term “red coyote morning.” That, according to Jay, was when you woke up with your arm underneath a girl so ugly that you would rather quietly gnaw it off than risk waking her by pulling it out.
He found the rusty tin snips in the bottom drawer of the workbench, grabbed them and walked back into the house.
Michael stood naked in front of the medicine cabinet and pulled the mirror off its hinges. He placed it next to the tub with everything else he’d gathered: the tin snips, the decanter of whiskey, a spoon, and the crystal candlestick with a lit candle in it.
He had decided that he needed a new nose; one that would let a little air through. And since he was the only doctor on hand, it was going to have to be a little down home discount surgery.
The whiskey was polished off in the same manner as the orange juice, but this time Michael spilled almost none. He was very careful, and by the time he was done, he felt numb. He knelt forward in the tub at the foot and propped the mirror against his knees. He held the spoon in the blue part of the candle flame.
He anticipated passing out from shock several times before the cutting was over, and he wanted to cauterize the wound before he did. Otherwise, he was likely to vomit on swallowed blood, and he knew he wouldn’t survive that unconscious.
With the spoon in his left hand he slipped the tip of one blade of the tin snips under the corner of his mouth. They closed with a squeak and Michael watched in the mirror as his smile widened and a line of blood ran down his chin. He had cut half an inch toward his ear. The spoon hovered over the skin, but the blood wasn’t that bad, and he didn’t think he’d black out yet.
He took a rest while he reheated the spoon, and then readied himself for another pass. Jamming the tin snips back into the cut sent a bolt of pain through him, but he managed a fast and deep stroke. He started tasting blood and just as he put the spoon to his cheek he looked in the mirror. He saw more of the cue ball than he had in a long time, and then there was just white agony.
Two steps forward, one step back. Michael had found that his own melted skin impeded his progress in cutting. The spoon had actually welded the flesh back together in places. Other than that, he didn’t think it was really that bad.
He looked in the mirror, which was dotted with blood. It gave the illusion that Michael had freckles all over the part of his face that was still there. Where his left cheek used to be was a hole; a tear almost from his cheekbone down to his jaw line. He saw his molars were grayish and bigger than he’d ever imagined. Behind them was more cue ball and back near the last tooth, a black gap where air was whistling in and out. Little threads of skin, like butterscotch drippings on a sundae, dangled across the hole and quivered.
He stepped out of the bathtub and walked naked into the hallway. He told himself that he could breathe now, he was safe, and he could simply wait until his wife got home for help. Then he heard something that sounded like a laugh come from the hole in the back of his new face.
In his office, Michael pulled down the hardcover copy of his first novel, Views from the Killing Jar. He looked at the photo of himself, the old him, on the back of the jacket for a full minute. He toyed with the idea of pulling his own teeth out. Then he turned his word processor on and began typing.
The putter would’ve been perfect. Its rubber grip wouldn’t slide like the drill bit did, but it was too damn long for Michael to grab its far end, and it was too thin to get a strangle hold on it. He thought of using the crystal candlestick too, that wonder tool of a thousand uses, but it was too short for any real leverage.
In the end the umbrella worked fine. Michael’s mouth felt good to be closed. He felt good, the way he did when he overcame a particularly ugly snag in his writing. Michael cleaned the house. He wiped up the blood in the bathtub, he put the tools back in the garage. He even went into the den and racked the scattered balls into a neat triangle on the pool table.
When everything was back in order, Michael went upstairs to bed. He was feeling lightheaded. He believed the cue ball, which he had managed to force entirely into his esophagus, had surely collapsed a few of the cartilage rings that support the trachea—maybe collapsed all of them.
Once again he wasn’t getting enough air, and his stomach was bothering him.
He crawled into bed making sure to put the left side of his face, the side with what he had decided to refer to as his deep shaft mining exercise, against the pillow. He pulled the covers up over his swollen throat. I must look perfectly normal from here, he thought. Sharon will be in for a nice surprise. I always liked those O. Henry surprise endings.
He folded his hands across his stomach. In a weak voice, to no one in particular, he said, “Christ, talk about your heartburn.”
When Sharon got out of the car Tuesday afternoon, the first place she looked for Michael was his office. He wasn’t there, but she went in anyway. His word processor was on, humming and glowing a dull amber. She went over to it and read the green words on the screen:
When Phil woke up, Copper was gone, and so were the ropes. Phil was half-sitting, half-lying in Cooper’s dental chair, and his face was almost entirely numb. He rolled his eyes down, but the edges of his vision down there were blocked by something. He reached up to his face and felt: his cheeks were puffed out, and his lips were stretched almost as far forward on his face as the tip of his nose. He brought his hands up to his eyes. They were covered with blood and spit. The bib was still clipped around his neck. He pulled it off. It, too, was drenched in drool and blood, and had been written on with one of the thick markers Cooper used for writing on x-ray film. The thick lines of ink made it look a little crazy, and it had been written in a hurried scrawl, making it look crazier still.
The novocaine will wear off by seven-thirty, Phil, the note read. That’s the mouth that you kissed my wife with, you son of a bitch. That’s the tongue you? Well, come seven-thirty, you’re going to wish you never had anything to do with that mouth. Good luck, you fucker.
Phil got up out of the chair and walked weakly over to the mirror. He leaned against a plaster model of Tuffy Tooth for support. It took him a moment to recognize himself. His mouth was all twisted out of alignment, and spit was running down his chin. Cooper had somehow stuffed a pool ball into his mouth. Phil allowed himself a glance at his watch just before the shock completely overtook his system. It said seven twenty-eight.
Sharon read the final paragraph with a shiver. She walked out of the office and went on looking for Michael. He wasn’t anywhere on the first floor, so Sharon started up the stairs to look for him there.
The End
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