The Gentling Box Page 5

  “Call me tenderfoot,” I said, and Mimi gave out a small giggle. The Lovari gypsies, the horsemen, used the term to mean a timid man—something like a horse with a stone in its hoof stepping carefully.

  I began wrapping my feet with the gauze, and I was luxuriating in the soothing feel of the cloth on my skin.

  “Tenderheaded is more like it. You’re making a mess of the bandage.” She frowned at the trailing white strips and lumpy spots. Mimi took the gauze out of my hands, and I stuck my feet out while she began winding more neatly.

  “Some of me’s not tender,” I said, grinning, and Mimi caught my eye, gave a little smile. I put my hand on her shoulder. “While Lenore is still outside. You know you always relax more,” I prompted.

  She nodded. We finished the bandaging, and Mimi drew the drapes. She left a plate of supper for Lenore on the stove. We went to bed.

  ***

  The room was thick with shadows. I was dimly aware of the caravan door opening, and I dismissed it, thinking Lenore had come in for dinner. I heard a series of small movements in the kitchen and kissed Mimi more avidly to distract her from the noises. If she heard Lenore, I thought, she’d get up, and who knew when she’d come back to bed.

  I rounded her breasts with both hands, then pressed my mouth to one brown nipple, felt her hands in my hair. She gave a little hum of satisfaction.

  “Yes,” she murmured, and I felt her hand slide down between us. My heart quickened, it wasn’t like her to touch me. I felt myself getting more excited.

  Surprised, I drew back. Mimi’s fingers slid between her own legs, moving in a slow rhythmic circle. She arched her hips, then suddenly sat up, pulling me with her, rubbing her breasts over my chest. “Umm,” she breathed and I felt her slick-damp fingers on my mouth, my chin, poking at my lips, and I sucked at them.

  Her legs curved over mine, my hands kneaded her hips, and they seemed softer, more yielding than usual. I pulled her closer, feeling the point of her chin in my shoulder, her hair hanging in a flood over my back.

  She was more sensual than she’d ever been and that inflamed me. We slid together smoothly, rocking along on a slow silent tide.

  ***

  Eyes closed, I rested snugly inside her and savored the last of our lovemaking. Skyrockets and stars, I thought, smiling to myself, and after all these years. I chuckled aloud.

  “Share the joke,” she said huskily into my ear.

  “You were so good in bed I was just wishing your mother would die everyday,” I said, shifting back, and hearing the soft ripply sound of our sweat damp skins parting.

  “Do you?” she asked, and I thought her voice had a throaty sound that was different.

  I gazed down. In the twilight gloom, her thighs had an unfamiliar heavy look, her belly was more rounded, topped by large pendulous breasts. “Don’t sit like that,” I snapped without thinking.

  “Wha—?” she sat up quickly, and the moving, blurry face I saw was not my wife’s. My pulse throbbed, my head whirled. The woman I saw had dark brows that were more sharply defined. Her full lips were red, pouting. Her hair was longer. I recalled how it hung softly over the skin of my back, and a spurt of panic went through me. I closed my eyes, kneaded my hands into fists.

  She got out of bed, reached for a dressing gown, and I heard the whisper of silk. I peeped through my lashes.

  Mimi’s white dressing gown, which trailed to the floor on her, hung to mid calf on this woman. Tied at the waist, it scarcely covered the bulging breasts, the flaring hips. Not a fat woman, I thought, but lush, overblown like a rose before the faded petals drop. I swallowed anxiously, felt sweat breaking out on my face. You’re imagining this, I told myself, you’re feverish, fevers can play havoc with your mind.

  “Imre, what’s wrong?”

  I looked up, absurdly relieved to see Mimi’s small plaintive face glancing back at me.

  “Nothing,” I said shivering, hugging her small body. “It’s this damn cold.” I sniffled, absently rubbing my nose. I caught a vague female scent and I shuddered with dread.

  -10-

  That night my half-dreams merged with memory, and I found myself wandering the landscape of older, simpler times, of that sweet green spring when I’d first brought Mimi with me into Hungary. Lying next to my wife, I recalled we’d camped one rainy dusk near the river Tisza, a sort of natural dividing line between the two halves of the prairie:

  I was trying to light a fire (it was my youthful brag that I could build one in any weather), and Mimi sat nearby on the steps of our caravan, listening to me tell the last part of an old fairy tale—what we called paramitsha. The stories were considered the property of the teller, and I’d inherited it from my Aunt Hannah.

  After a while I finished, and we sat quietly; then I said, “I love the rain, love to hear the sound of it. It brings out my gypsy side.” I glanced toward her; in the lantern light, I could see some of the color was coming back into her cheeks. The trek was doing her good, I thought. “Back in England, that’s just what they call this kind of rainy spring weather—gypsy weather.”

  I cuddled and babied a small spark of flame deep inside the center of the wood pile. I went on my hands and knees, blew on the coals softly; they began to glow. “And it was my Aunt Hannah, believe it or not, who taught me the right way to light damp wood and make a good hot fire.”

  “Yes,” Mimi said, smiling, “so you’ve told me. That and how the English Roms are known for storytelling.”

  “Got it,” I said, getting up and going to the windward side to remove the small screen of branches I’d placed there. “I told you, Aunt Hannah’s method is foolproof—any night, any weather—”

  Mimi was grinning at me now, her eyes sparkling with mirth. Genuinely puzzled, I stopped.

  “You got the fire lit,” she pointed with one slim arm, then she began to laugh. “And you told me a damn fine story while you did it, but you forgot,” she said, actually holding her stomach, “we don’t have anything to cook over it.”

  “Oh, shit,” I muttered, running one hand through my hair. I gave her a sheepish grin. She hopped up from the stairs, and put one arm through mine. “Okay, English boy, you showed your stuff, now I’ll show you mine.”

  And that was how my wife taught me the Romanian method of procuring dinner that was quaintly known as drabbing the baulo—or poisoning the pig.

  ***

  “I learned this from my great Aunt Medala,” she said, for a tease after she got her “supplies” from inside our caravan. We were on foot, both of us wearing boots and hats to keep the rain off, and we followed the road to a nearby farm.

  Mimi set out across a muddy field, telling me to listen for the sound of the pigs in their pen. “Or barring that,” she whispered, “the Romanians say you can locate them by smell—in any weather,” she giggled, and I pinched her on the can, then waded after her.

  Sure enough, after a few minutes of roaming in the dark, she tracked the pigs to their sty. In the distance, I could see yellow light from a window in the small, one storey farmhouse spilling out into a swept yard.

  “Aunt Medala,” she whispered conspiratorially, “says in a pinch you can use ground glass, but personally, she and I prefer the sponge method.”

  I watched my wife reach under her oilskin cape and extract a flat hard sponge that looked more like a wood chip than anything else. She was careful to keep it out of the wet. Then she brought out a lump of lard she’d wrapped up in cheesecloth. She smeared the dried sponge with the lard, coating it thickly. Then, as quickly as she could, she climbed up and over the rickety side of the pen.

  “You want a whole sow, or just a piglet?” she asked me through the boards.

  “Just hurry,” I said back. You never knew when pigs might turn mean, especially if there was a boar around.

  A minute or two later Mimi was clambering back over the boards. On the ground, she put her hand in mine. “I fed it to one that looked just-weaned,” she giggled. “No need to get greedy.”
>
  “Now what?”

  “Now English boy, tonight you have to go hungry, so you might as well make love to me to help you forget your stomach.” She began tugging me after her across the field.

  “Then what?”

  She pulled me close and held on to the lapels of my jacket. “By the time you finish feasting on me, it will be tomorrow, and tomorrow you feast on pork.”

  ***

  “Nice fire, you’re a good provider, Imre,” Mimi smirked. It was getting on toward noon, the rain had stopped, but the weather was still damp under a heavy cloud cover. The smell of roasting pig drifted on the humid air, set my stomach rumbling, my mouth watering.

  “Nice fire, but nicer still to have something cooking on it—plus a wife who’s a good provider,” I told her.

  Mimi nodded, and poked at the slowly blackening carcass with a fork. “Not quite done yet,” she said, and then she went on to finish up the story of how she put great Aunt Medala’s tried and true method into practice.

  “Naturally, when the sponge expands in the intestinal tract, it kills the pig,” she said.

  “Naturally.”

  “Luckily, it wasn’t a very big pig—sometimes the big ones take longer to die from the blockage. If you have a large group to feed, though . . . .” she sighed.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I ambled along the road in the wagon early this morning—you know, as if I was just happening by. The piglet was still squealing, and I could hear it even over the noise of the wheels and the harness bells. When I got to the farm, the farmer was standing by the pen. ‘Hey, mister,’ I yelled, ‘you want your future told?’

  “He put his hands on his hips, and said in this annoyed voice, ‘Lady, it doesn’t take a goddamn gypsy to know that pig is going to die.’ And he pointed—I swear, right at my pig.

  “I said, ‘Oh, well, I know a lot about herbs, maybe I have something—some tonic in my caravan—’ but he cut me off.

  “‘I don’t have time for tonics—or beggars.’ He frowned at me and he turned away.

  “This is always the tricky part,” Mimi explained, “when you have to be the most cunning—and to do that, like Aunt Medala said, you have to play a little dumb. I got down from the wagon and walked over—but not too near. ‘Do you think it’s some kind of disease? I hope it’s not a disease.’ The pig’s entire snout was just covered with a scummy white froth,” Mimi said, touching the corners of her mouth and chin, “the saliva backs up when it has no place to go.

  “The farmer just shrugged,” she went on, “but I knew what was coming: The stomach twists up, the pig goes into convulsions, and its heart stops. It was wonderful; about a minute later the piglet started twitching like a possessed puppet. Then it gave one long last hideous squeal and keeled over.

  “‘Oh fucking Christ,’ the farmer muttered, and he was old—but spry, with lots of ropy muscles—and he got right up over the pen, and he hauled my pig out, and then he was standing back on my side of the pen, and the pig was lying on the ground at our feet, and he was staring at it.

  “‘It’s quite a young one,’ I said. ‘Maybe—’”

  “‘It was fine, yesterday.’ he said.

  “‘For your sake, I hope it’s not some terrible disease that might spread to the others—’

  “He grunted at me and said thanks.

  “‘But you know,’ I told him, looking directly into his blue eyes, and reaching in my pocket, ‘if you want to sell it, I guess the meat would be good enough for my dogs.’ And I showed him a couple of forints in my hand.

  “I could see he was worried about the rest of his pen, and he flapped one grizzled hand at me. ‘Nah, take it,’ he said.’”

  Mimi began to laugh. “It’s always the same—as long as you offer to pay, they give it to you free. Who cares what happens to a bunch of dirty gypsy dogs?” She paused, eyes sparkling, “But would you believe I got him to help me carry the piglet right to our caravan on the road?” Her brown-violet eyes widened. “Aunt Medala would be proud,” she snorted. “I got that cart turned around in a jiffy and I got those horses moving.” She mimed using the whip. “And the last thing I heard was the farmer suddenly shouting, ‘Hey, you said you had dogs! Hey Lady, where are the dogs?’

  “He probably realized a second too late, there was no barking, no dogs trotting after the caravan, and when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw he’d been running, he was breathing hard and he had one hand pressed to his big chest, but he was stopped in the road, and I knew he wasn’t going to keep chasing me.”

  “I love you,” I said.

  “Yep. Know what the old Romany gypsies say about ‘poisoned pig?’” Her small face was lit with glee. I shook my head. “They say it’s the best meat for you in the world.”

  We both laughed, and in a little while, we stuffed ourselves on the world’s best meat.

  ***

  Lying in bed, smiling to myself, I recalled it was one of Lenore’s favorite stories from “before I was born,” as she put it, and she always wanted to meet great Aunt Medala. We could never convince her that it was a joke between Mimi and me, that there was no great Aunt Medala, that Mimi made her up because I’d been bragging about my Aunt Hannah.

  “Aunt Medala, Lenore,” I whispered to myself, sleepily. And I felt Mimi’s hand steal out of the dark and lightly touch my shoulder. I turned on my side, then fell into a dreamless sleep.

  ***

  I woke to the sound of moaning. The caravan was dark. I didn’t know how long I’d been sleeping, but for an instant I thought Mimi was crying out in a nightmare; then I heard the rustle of the covers being pushed aside, the squeak of her bare feet scurrying over the waxed boards, and Lenore’s voice bleating in the distance. “Mother, Mom—Momma,” she groaned. My daughter’s voice rose to a drawn out scream. “Mo-o-otherrrr!”

  I raced from the bed, tripping over the loosed bandages, cursing under my breath. I caught the wild dance of a swinging lamp, the sound of confusion, a tremendous thump, Mimi’s voice shrieking. I tore at the gauze and ran.

  At the other end of the caravan, Lenore was sitting up in her bed, bent over, holding her arms at her waist. Mimi was trying to climb into her sleeping berth, a kind of compartment like a ship’s bunk with sliding wooden doors. Both of them were weeping. Mimi rocked our daughter. I saw lights flickering outside the windows, gypsies running toward the caravan. An iron that usually rested on the woodstove in the kitchen lay overturned on the floor. Its sole plate was wet.

  At the end of the pocketbed lay the foot long carcass of a locust-like insect. Its great head was crushed, exposing a soft yellowish substance the color of rotting honeycomb and dripping thin serous blood. Splats of this sticky-looking fluid covered the blankets, the wall, the ceiling of Lenore’s tiny chamber. A dull light shone in its outsize black eyes, and now I saw a fragment of thin, leathery antenna clinging to the heavy iron. The tail—a kind of bifurcated prong—twitched rhythmically, leaking the same pale red fluid in a dribbling spray.

  Without thinking I yanked at the covers at the same time I slammed the door all the way open. The body rolled against the moving door, one spindly leg wedged in the narrow gap. The door bounced back, nearly jumping its small track, and sliced the body in two. The head and thorax clumped heavily onto the floor, and I ground it underfoot.

  There was a thick crunch, twin sensations: the prickly feel of its shell, the spongy mass beneath it. I drew my foot away and felt something cold and wet adhering to my skin, then saw a viscous string trailing from my heel to the ruined head. My gorge rose, I scraped the mess of yellow slime against the floor.

  “The tail, the tail,” Lenore moaned.

  It was twitching yet. I spread my fingers into a hard claw and raked it from the edge of the bed. It flopped on the floor, and my breath whistled out of my throat. “Christ, Christ.” The pain, where the tips of my fingers had grazed the thrashing tail, was enormous. It throbbed in sickening spikes, jolting up my forearm to my shoulder. I seized my
elbow, nearly sank to my knees.

  Lenore’s face was a deadly white, her arms cradled over her abdomen. My stomach rolled with my own pain, the thought the thing had touched her.

  I clambered to my feet, threw a great clot of bedding over the blackened body, booted it out of the way. Jostled, Lenore cried out; she stiffened upright, arms jerked high, away.

  My gaze fell on the bloody shreds of her nightgown. A great hammering rose in my brain. A round weeping wound—no bigger than an eye—glistened wetly in the downy fuzz between her legs. I swallowed, started to turn away. She was too old for me to see her so frankly. I felt Mimi’s hand on my arm pulling me back, forcing me to look, to understand. From the wound, a series of red black streaks ran up Lenore’s abdomen, and spidered across the tiny hillocks of her breasts.

  Even as I watched, a fine tendril coursed the pale flesh of her throat. Pinpricks of blood hemorrhaged under the skin as it burrowed toward her ear.

  I glanced at my hand. The pain was subsiding a little, the flesh unmarked.

  “It entered Lenore,” Mimi whispered, smoothing our daughter’s thick hair back from her forehead.

  I nodded, then stopped. “What do you mean, entered?”

  Mimi stood up, her breath hot in my ear: “It was on her, its mouth sunk in her belly, the antennae waving greedily over her chest, the tail fastening, grinding into her—her—” She shut her eyes, passed a shaky hand over her brow.

  I saw it in my mind’s eye: the whip-like feelers, the wicked abdomen arching obscenely, the scorpion tail flicking inside my child.

  “We have to save her,” she whispered, her cold hand closing over my wrist. My gaze traveled to the humped roll of bedding in the corner.

  There was a tap at the window, I turned and saw a crowd of faces, the flare of torchlight.

  A hissing noise made me pivot toward the corner again. A narrow thread of smoke wound up from the floor. I took two lurching steps and seized the blankets. Nothing, there was nothing but scorch marks. The squashed jelly of the head smoldered and disappeared. The room smelled of charred wood.