This morning Yeorgi woke up in his backyard feeling a bruise on his lower back, convinced that stacked chairs and vodka were not his friends, nor was his wife, if he was being honest, or his goat Omar, whose pretense of loyalty clashed with Yeorgi’s trusting nature—and poor little Boots lying dead with light bulb fragments decorating her scant cleavage, well, she was no great pal either, always shoving him into hazardous, life-threatening tasks, always trying to get out of paying him, criticizing. About this injury he could not tell his wife, the woman who always told him never to confide in anyone any farther than he could throw them (twenty, thirty feet, tops), yet he felt an urge to tell someone, perhaps a nurse at the free clinic, or maybe just a few strangers who needed a laugh.

Omar raised his horns from dead leaves and sneezed throughout Yeorgi’s confession.

Groaning in through the back door, Yeorgi noticed the kitchen smelled foodless, like a flooded basement on a Spring afternoon with a fresh brick wall curing behind the furnace. He leaned over the sink, gawking through the window at his neighbor Dave’s gravel driveway. No, Yeorgi’s mouth never seemed to completely close. And when it did, he was puckering, really trying. A silver Beetle named Stu crunched into Dave’s driveway.

Yeorgi called to his pregnant wife, who was shuffling around in the living room, “Here comes Dave again.”

Margot entered the kitchen and sat her purse on the countertop and peered into it. “You’re in love with Dave.” She opened a compact and peered into that. “Love’s a dangerous thing. It’ll make you think everything’s okay, the way it should be, and then—” Snap! “So why don’t you just lay off him?”

“Lay off him? Is that a crack about me being unemployed?”

Her laughter told Yeorgi that she didn’t respect his right as a U.S. citizen to be suspicious and disdainful of his neighbors, friends, and in-laws, but was she also laughing at his provider status? After all, his mother caught Margot trying to manage a handful of change with two accountants on YouTube. But what could he do, break up the act and risk exile and a terrible end in the old country? Better to be publicly shamed in America, Yeorgi, than to be dragged five hundred miles by wild donkeys through ragged mountains and then garroted with your own colon, near a cave. He so wished Mama Krutza’s letters held more cheerfulness, more hope, and less spot-on insights. She always closed with, Gods, man, do you want to be buried alive— or dead? Let me know.

“Why must you always make a crack about me not working?” Yeorgi lightly touched his throbbing back, remembering himself spinning, propeller-like, through Boots’s massive stairwell and getting tangled in her hairdo before smacking hardwood treads. “What of your middling tolerance for me?”

Margot turned an unlit jack-o-lantern on the countertop to face him. “What of your waking up in our backyard and spying on Dave?” She shook her head for a while. “Maybe Boots will hire you full time. Did you change her lightbulb last night?”

“No. Too high. Not enough kitchen chairs.”

“Okay, you and Omar need a plan.”

When she turned for the back door, Yeorgi reached out and grabbed her elbow and spun her to him. “Is everything hunky dory?”

“Is suffering and death and carrying your baby hunky fucking dory? Not to me!” She ripped herself away and backhanded the grimace off his face. “See?”

“I will bake you.” Yeorgi dragged her down by her neck and gave her a peek through the oven door window. She bashed his skull with her purse. It emptied (her purse) onto the floor and a stack of fifty-dollar bills slid up against the dishwasher. Yeorgi picked it up, flipped through it. “Margot, where did you get this?” He sniffed it. “Is it for real?”

She snatched the money and stood. “I’m being blackmailed.”

“What? Who?”

“Good neighbor Dave. Duh! Why else would he live in that gutted dump?”

“How is this happening?”

“He has pictures of me and him.”

“Doing what?”

“Saying cheese.” Her sarcasm ruffled his grayish-blond crewcut, the only thing about him, she told friends, which didn’t smack of the Iron Age. “I know, right? I’m as shocked as you are!”

“You are pregnant, Margot. Can I see these pictures?”

“What are ya, some kind of pervert, wanting to watch me and our neighbor get it on like a couple feral hogs?”

Yeorgi, skull beaming like tanned glass beneath his hair, sank into a chair and planted his elbows on the table and bent his ears forward, gazing up at her as she straightened herself. This was no longer the woman who had pledged to kill him with patience and understanding, who quoted Pasternak and Barkov in broken English with a Brooklyn accent, who kissed his forehead and said, “Poor sweet Polish sausage.” This was a wisecracking dame maneuvering for his rack and ruin.

“Now help me to understand,” he said. “Dave has pictures of you two having relations and he is threatening to show them to me if you do not pay him? Is that what you mean? Stop paying him and let him show me the pictures!”

“You don’t have the stomach.”

“Prepare to be amazed.”

“Man, I’ve been preparing to be amazed since we got married. I’m not even vaguely amused yet.”

“This is absurd, Margot. How much are you paying him?”

“One-thousand three-hundred twenty-six dollars and fifty-seven cents a month. He won’t put out for a penny less.” She clapped once in his face. “Don’t feel threatened. He doesn’t satisfy me either. My God, it’s like watching someone drown.”

“You have got to be kidding. Be serious! How long has this been going on?”

“Three years.”

“We have only been married two! And where are you getting all this money?”

“I’m stealing it from—well, it’s really none of your business.”

“Old lady Boots? Little Boots? The woman I do odd jobs for? The woman you run all over creation? Is that who? It is! Why?”

“It’s a pittance to her, that’s why. And if my plan goes right, she’ll leave me almost a million kicks when she bucks. Then I can buy you some pants.”

“This is just too much, Margot. Adultery? Bilking? What next?”

“Whatcha got?”

Yeorgi fell out of his chair, then cracked to his hairy marble-white feet. “I will seek a bill of divorcement! I will get an annulment! I will sue! I will—”

“And I will get an abortion,” she drawled, head in the refrigerator. She pulled out a bottle of pumpkin ale and rapidly pried off the cap with his lower teeth.

“YEE-OUCH!”

“I’ve got a respectable job. You’re a tramp over from Poland. You’re going to shut up until I pull your chain. That’s right. One more dumb move and it’s—” She dragged her thumbnail across her belly and made the sound of tearing cloth. “I’ll ship you and Omar back to Poland in a crate, third class, sure, and you two’ll be hustled into street porn with the crack whores.” She pointed at him with her beer bottle and laughed so hard she had to wipe off her chin. “And remember, unlike you, I’m not into love and family and all this inclusivity crap.”

“None of that made any sense to me!” Yeorgi spit blood in the sink. “Stop paying Dave.” He rinsed out his mouth. “Let him show me the pictures and this will all end.”

She laughed, then frowned. “How do you think we’ve been living so high on the hog around this dump? I milk Boots like a cash cow, and Dave’s blackmail is the impetus. Hey, I didn’t get you that goat from Warsaw with the pentagram on its forehead on a cleaning lady’s salary, that’s a sure-fire cinch.” She looked out the double window at the stoic Omar looking back at her, chewing on a red poppy, chained in a perfect circle of dirt near an oak tree. He stopped chewing and jerked up his head at her. “Ridiculous.”

A sardonic bleating sifted through the window screen.

“But I wanted a pentagram with a goat’s head in it. A tattoo. Not a live goat! Do I look Puerto Rican?”

“Ba-ah-ah-ah-ah!” Omar protested.

“Okay. Here goes. Yeorgi, it was all bullshit. Everything I said since I walked into this kitchen was lies, a Halloween gag. Sure. If you don’t fall for something, you’ll stand for anything. Right? There’s no blackmail, no bilking, no abortion. I’m not even preggo.” She pulled a hunk of foam from under her shirt and glanced it off his forehead. “Lighten up. Okay. So. I’ll see you tonight? Late? Boots won’t answer her phone, but I’m sure she still wants me to run her up to Carson Station today.”

“Gods, Margot, we were so happy yesterday.”

“Aw, that’s two days before tomorrow.” Margot was lit for a movie, a one-star movie that went straight to video and quickly to the bottom of the bargain bin. “I’m off shopping, then to Boots’s.”

Yeorgi lunged for Margot’s purse. She ripped it out of his reach, then left through the back door laughing the triumphant laughter of a soul with no flesh to feel hell’s punishing flames. Omar and Yeorgi watched opposite sides of her sashay across the patio to the driveway. Then Yeorgi ran to the window over the sink and watched her climb into her convertible and roar off down the road, auburn hair rigid, peach chiffon scarf dancing in a breezy noose, sinking below the hill. Now he glared at Stu’s silver hubcaps. He dashed to the bedroom and pulled on underwear and pants, but by the time he got to the back door, he could hear Stu grating over the hill, sounding like a straw sucking watery ice, toneless and hollow.

He texted Dave, I will teach you to mess with my wife!

No need, friend. Already know how, Dave replied. Then, And she was a lot better in my fantasies. You ever think about beating her? I do. But seriously she’d have to lose that belly before I’d ever get serious about her lol. Wait who is this?

Sorry. Sent to wrong person

“Comedians! I will show those phonies. But later. When there is more time. Now where did she put that goat chow?”

Above Yeorgi’s head, a sixty-watt light bulb appeared, orange, grimy, and with a tarnished gold base. Why wait for nightfall and dig Boots’s grave in the woods? He could seize an opportunity, a rare act for him, for this accidental death that was turning into a crime of passion, Margot and Dave’s crime of passion, that is, and, since Margot has touted him to the world as a stumbling void, it wouldn’t matter how many detective eyes picked it apart or poked holes in it. Sure, mixing agility and competence gave Yeorgi bruises and hangovers, but as far as anyone knew, that was Margot’s goat! Omar would help make this transference of guilt as easy as folding an egg in the fires of Tophet.

But Yeorgi never did find the goat chow and Omar wouldn’t budge from the backyard without a snack—or a no-nonsense, straightforward plan—so Yeorgi climbed into his rustic pickup truck and went alone to collect Boots’s corpse. When he returned, he unchained Omar and lured him through the overcast murk and opened his tailgate.

“Goat chow backordered. That is a snack. A treat. Eat, Omar. Eat!”

Omar grumbled something out of the side of his mouth and Yeorgi went stiff and his crewcut turned deep cornflower in a noiseless burst of gold dust. His head turned too far to the right, and he torpedoed into a strip of weeds between the driveways. Omar’s wheezy laughter added to the fun.

A rowdy argument ensued, after which they managed to stuff and ram Boots’s body in through one of Dave’s basement windows. They listened as their deposit slam danced through bongos, guitars, a drum set, shelves of pickling jars, then two splashes of water smacked their faces. Man and goat looked at each other as if for the first time.

“Ba-ah-ah-ah-ah.”

“Humbug!”

At dusk, after Dave and Margot pulled into their driveways and went inside their houses, Omar, chained and belly growling, trained his vengeful gaze at Dave’s roof until lightning twice struck an ancient TV antenna wrapped with orange string lights jutting from a dormer slope, supercharging the house’s wiring, including a brown extension cord in the puddle under Boots. A bright blue FZZT! flashed in every window. Circuit breakers tripped.

Dave texted Margot like a man of action, Do you guys have power?

Boots opened her hazel eyes in basement darkness, then propped herself up on her elbows. “Yeorgi, you schmuck, you didn’t change my lightbulb yet?”

November 25, 2024