American Falls: The Collected Short Stories Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  “I Wish I’d Made It Up”

  American Falls

  Wrap It Up

  A Fair Price

  My Last Martini

  Cat Women of Rome

  Romántica

  The Old Days

  The Tunisian Notebook

  The Unspoken (Il Nondetto)

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Only You

  Vendetta

  New Mysteries of Paris

  Room 584, The Starr Hotel

  Two Border Stories

  The Big Love of Cherry Layne

  A Really Happy Man

  The Brief Confession of an Unrepentant Erotic

  The Yellow Palace

  For This, We Give Thanks

  The Lost Christmas

  The Winner

  The Lonely and the Lost - A NOVELLA

  the pharaoh’s flame

  a star fell from heaven

  secrets in the dark

  ruler of my heart

  the chosen few

  a classical education

  a better world than this

  sweethearts

  the robbery

  dog and wolf

  the morning after, the day before

  the eyes have it

  the devil in disguise

  the nature of the beast

  take it to the bank

  quartet

  tough call

  either/or

  lost and found

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  this book is for the boys—

  gene,

  ray,

  and doctor bruce

  “I Wish I’d Made It Up”

  A NOTE TO THE READER

  On a summer’s day in 1957, I was sitting on top of the backrest of a bench next to a ballfield at Green Briar Park in Chicago when for some reason I no longer can remember I thought about how old I would be in the year 2000. The answer was fifty-three, a figure virtually beyond imagining insofar as the possibility of my ever attaining such an age. The millennial year itself likewise eluded serious speculation—at ten I had difficulty contemplating much beyond the very moment. I was shaken from this reverie of the incomprehensible by a kid shouting at me, “Hey, Gif, you’re up!”

  I am now fully two years older than the fifty-three that seemed so unrealistic as well as unrealizable that afternoon in Green Briar Park forty-four and a half years ago. Turning thirty, or forty, or fifty, did not disturb me. My Uncle Buck, who will be ninety-one this coming May, told me several years ago that according to his research anyone who dies before the age of 120 has died a premature death. About a year ago, he revised this plateau of minimal longevity to 130.

  Perhaps he’s right. At ninety, Uncle Buck works steadily as a civil engineer and architect, drawing plans for houses and offices, keeping almost as busy as ever. He took off for ten days in November and went fishing out of Progréso, on the Yucatan coast, with a guide only slightly younger than himself. No old men of the sea, Buck reported that they were extremely successful, catching fish every day with nary a mishap.

  There’s more to the above: the year before, my uncle was in Progréso when he met the guide and arranged to go out fishing with him the next morning. That night he broke his leg and had to be hospitalized. The guide had no telephone, so Buck could not contact him. After one week in the hospital in Progréso, my uncle, using a pair of hand-hewn crutches furnished for him by the husband of one of the nurses in a hospital without doctors, got himself to the closest big town, Mérida, where he literally hopped on a plane back to Tampa, Florida, where he lives. It took quite a while for his leg to heal, but after it did, he returned to Progréso. One morning, about a year later, Buck showed up at the fishing guide’s house. “I’m ready to go,” Uncle Buck said to the man when he answered the door. The guide stared at my uncle for a few moments, remembered, then said, “Let me get my hat.”

  It was in the same year, 1957, that I considered the phenomenon of turning fifty, that I began writing stories. My first effort, titled “All in Vain,” was about two brothers who fought on opposite sides during the War Between the States. It was about seven pages long, printed on yellow legal paper. My mother threw it out in a cleaning frenzy some years later, so I don’t have it for reference, but I do recall that at the end the two boys shot each other and they both died.

  I’ve always considered the short story the most difficult form in which to write. I’ve written novels, essays, plays, screenplays, poems, songs, even an opera libretto, but the short story has always been my favorite, most challenging mode of composition. It seems to me that the story about my uncle and his fishing guide in Mexico is about as perfect a story as there can ever be. I wish I’d made it up. The ones in this book are the best I’ve been able to make up so far.

  BARRY GIFFORD

  Christmas 2001

  American Falls

  The weather wasn’t what could be called really cold yet, not in this part of the country, early mid-October in southern Idaho, but it was in the air, that threat locals became aware of almost as soon as the Winnebagos beat their retreat after Labor Day. Yoshiko shivered as she walked the nearly two hundred yards from where the schoolbus dropped her off to the motel. This morning her mother, Maiko, had made her wear her father’s old sheepskin coat, the one Toru claimed he had been wearing when he was run over by a train. This was Yoshiko’s father’s favorite story, one he had told to her and her little brother, Miki, many times, showing them the coat with two black crease marks across the back of it that he insisted were made by the locomotive’s wheels. Yoshiko was now thirteen and she knew it would have been impossible for her father to have survived such an accident had the indentations on the coat been made by a train. Miki, at ten, still believed the story. Toru insisted it was true, and told his children he had descended to earth from the Realm of the Immortals, that he would return there only when the Immortals called him back.

  “When will that be?” Miki asked.

  “When my work is finished,” answered Toru.

  “You mean running the motel?” said Yoshiko, sarcastically.

  “No,” said her father, smiling at her feigned insouciance. “When both of you are grown up and well on your way in the world.”

  Throughout this exchange Maiko kept silent; it was not in her nature to debunk or contradict her husband in front of anyone, especially their children. Privately, however, she chastised him for fostering false beliefs in Yoshiko and Miki.

  “They’ll really believe you’re immortal,” she said, “that you’re going to live forever.”

  “Well, perhaps I will,” said Toru.

  Yoshiko arrived at the motel office just as Al Miller, the postman, pulled up in his green 1957 Chrysler Newport with three dents in the hood he claimed had been made by an eight-point buck that bounced off the car the evening of the late September day he’d bought it. The buck, Al said, had stared at him through the windshield for several moments before sliding off and dashing into the brush. Yoshiko had always meant to ask Al Miller why he’d never had the dents pounded out but she never remembered to do this when she saw him. Al said the deer had eyes like Ava Gardner’s.

  “Afternoon, Yoshiko,” he said, after he’d rolled down his driver’s side window. Al held out toward her a small, rolled-up packet of mail bound by a rubber band. “You can save me getting out. My hip’s botherin’ me fierce as a wolverine in heat, and if I move sudden my lower back stiffens up.”

  Al was a short, bald, overweight man i
n his early fifties. He always had terrible breath from bad cigars so Yoshiko kept an arm’s length from him as she accepted the mail packet.

  “Thanks, honey. Say hello to your folks for me.”

  The postman rolled his window back up and drove off.

  Yoshiko looked at the mail before going inside. Most of it consisted of advertising flyers and magazines addressed to Blackfoot Motel, Star Route, Highway 30, American Falls, Idaho. There were a couple of business-size envelopes addressed to her father. Nothing for her. Yoshiko had a pen pal in Alexandria, Egypt, named Nazli Mrabet, from whom she was expecting a letter. Each of the students in Yoshiko’s eighth grade class at her school in Pocatello, which was twenty-five miles east of American Falls, had pen pals in various parts of the world. Nazli was very curious about the United States of America; she didn’t understand, she wrote Yoshiko, how a Japanese girl could be living in a motel in Idaho. Yoshiko explained to Nazli that her grandfather, her father’s father, had emigrated from Osaka to Wyoming in 1912 to work on the railroad, and after that had traveled up to Idaho where he had a farm and where her father, Toru, had been born. Toru had met Yoshiko’s mother, Maiko, in San Francisco, when he was visiting that city’s Nihonmachi, the Japantown closest to Idaho, on a holiday. Together her parents had worked on the farm, then sold it and bought the Blackfoot Motel in American Falls.

  Yoshiko had also to explain what a motel was as opposed to a hotel. Even though it was 1965, there was still no such thing as a motor hotel in Egypt, at least not in Alexandria. Perhaps there were motels in Cairo, Nazli wrote, but she couldn’t say because she had never been to Cairo. She hoped to go there in a few years, she told Yoshiko, to attend nursing school. Nazli had wanted to be a nurse since she was a little girl, ever since she had visited her father, Ahmed, in a hospital after his left leg had been severely mutilated in a construction accident. The nurses had been so kind and attentive to her father, Nazli said, and had taken such good care of him, that Ahmed did not lose his leg as the doctors feared he might. For now she maintained a doll hospital, and repaired her own and friends’ damaged dolls.

  Yoshiko entered the motel office, which was also the front door to her family’s living quarters. Toru was standing behind the registration desk, reading the previous day’s newspaper.

  “Hi, Pop,” said Yoshiko. “Miki feeling any better?”

  Her father looked up at her over his wire-rim reading glasses.

  “I think so. Your mother made him stay in bed all day.”

  As Yoshiko passed through the office, heading towards the “house,” she asked, “Any new customers today?”

  “Not yet,” said Toru, “still early.”

  Maiko was in the kitchen, cutting vegetables. Yoshiko kissed her mother, who told her not to disturb Miki, that he was asleep. Yoshiko went to her room and closed the door. She was tired, too, having risen at five o’clock that morning to finish her homework from the day before. She had more homework to do now, but she collapsed on her bed without taking off her father’s heavy sheepskin coat.

  When she woke up it was black outside. She was sweaty and heavy-headed but felt better when she smelled the familiar and pleasant odor of cooking rice coming from the kitchen. Yoshiko got up, took off the coat and went to the bathroom to clean up for dinner. She could hear muffled voices in conversation as she washed her face. As Yoshiko dried herself with a towel, she realized there was a voice she did not recognize talking to her father. This person, a man, thought Yoshiko, spoke with an accent entirely unfamiliar to her. She became curious about the voice, so hastily completed her washing and went to the office. There she saw a black man, not very big, perhaps an inch or two taller than Toru, who was below average height. The man was quite a bit thicker than her father, but Yoshiko sensed those were muscles straining against his powder blue summer sportcoat, not fat. He was in his early to mid-thirties, agreeable to look at, she thought, with a narrow mustache shorn so that it curliecued slightly over the rim of his upper lip like a slinky, dark brown caterpillar.

  The man stopped talking when Yoshiko appeared. He stared at her.

  “My daughter,” said Toru.

  Then the man stopped looking at her, said “Thank you” to Yoshiko’s father, and walked out of the office through the front door. Maiko emerged from the kitchen and stared after him.

  “Who’s that, Pop?” asked Yoshiko.

  “A customer,” he said. “I gave him twenty-nine.”

  “I’ve never seen a black person before,” said Yoshiko.

  “Sure you have,” said Toru, “on television.”

  “That’s not the same.”

  “Why is he here?” asked Maiko.

  “I didn’t ask him.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “He wanted a room. I gave him one.”

  “Maybe he’s going to work on the dam,” said Yoshiko. “I heard at school the American Falls Dam Company is hiring again.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Mr. James, my history teacher, told Buddy French that if he didn’t have his next book report in on time he might just as well go get one of those new jobs at the dam because his chances of graduating grammar school would be little or none.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Toru.

  “Buddy French told Mr. James he was going to work as a ranger in the Minidoka woods. Why do you think the black man is here, Pop?”

  “He could be a criminal,” said Maiko. “From Denver, or Reno.”

  “I think he’s sort of pretty,” said Yoshiko.

  “Is dinner ready?” asked Toru.

  Maiko ducked back into the kitchen. Yoshiko and Toru followed her and found Miki already seated, spooning rice into his mouth. Toru and Yoshiko sat down.

  “You must be feeling better,” Toru said to his son. “I’m glad.”

  “Me, too,” said Miki, spitting rice onto the table.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” scolded Maiko, as she took her seat.

  “What kind of a car is he driving?” asked Yoshiko.

  “Chevy Impala,” said Toru.

  “New?”

  “Three years old, 1962. White.”

  “What kind of car is who driving?” Miki asked.

  “A black man is in twenty-nine,” said Yoshiko.

  “I want to see,” said Miki. He slid off his chair and ran out of the kitchen.

  “Miki!” shouted Maiko. “Finish your dinner!”

  “I’ll get him,” said Yoshiko, who got up and followed her brother.

  Maiko looked at Toru. “Why don’t you say something?”

  Toru kept eating. “Such as?”

  “Get them to behave.”

  “They behave very well, I think. The soup is delicious.”

  Miki had left the front door open and Yoshiko stepped out onto the little porch. She could see Miki in front of twenty-nine, checking out the ivory ’62 Impala.

  “Miki,” she said, “come back in. Remember, you’re sick.”

  Miki skipped back and up the steps.

  “Not anymore, I’m not,” he said, grinning. “That’s a pretty sharp car. The license plate is from Illinois.”

  “Illinois? He must be from Chicago.”

  Together they went inside, closed the door, and rushed to the registration book, which lay open on the desk.

  “What does it say?” asked Miki, as his sister read silently.

  “Charles Bone, 225 Arvin Road, Rockford, Illinois.”

  “Is Rockford, Illinois, a long way from here?”

  “A very long way.”

  Yoshiko and Miki went back into the kitchen and sat down at the table.

  “Find out anything interesting?” asked Toru.

  “He’s Charles Bone from Rockford, Illinois,” said Yoshiko, “but you already know.”

  “That’s what he says,” said Miki. “He could be making it up.”

  “It doesn’t matter, does it?” said Maiko. “Now finish your dinner.”

  “Ch
arles Bone is a strange name, don’t you think, Pop?” Yoshiko asked.

  “Some people might say the same about our names,” said Toru. “Maybe where he comes from the name Bone is quite common.”

  Maiko stood up, picked up her bowls and carried them to the sink.

  “I just hope he’s not a bad man,” she said.

  “Bad men need to sleep, too, Mama,” said Toru.

  Maiko turned on the faucet and began washing dishes.

  “He should sleep and go.”

  Toru laughed. “Don’t worry. This man has a good face.”

  Yoshiko and Miki finished eating, got up with their bowls and put them in the sink.

  “I have homework,” said Yoshiko.

  Miki headed toward the office again.

  “Where are you going?” Toru asked him.

  “I just want to see,” said Miki.

  “There’s nothing to see,” said Maiko. “Miki, you’ve been sick. Go back to bed.”

  Miki looked through the curtains on the front window. The Impala was still parked there and a light was on in twenty-nine. Then the light went off.

  Toru came and stood next to his son.

  “Anything exciting to report?”

  “The light in his room just went out.”

  “Mr. Bone is probably tired from driving.”

  Toru picked up his son, who was small for his age.

  “Your mother is right, you should get back into bed if you’re going to school tomorrow.”

  “Okay, Pop.”

  Miki put his head down on his father’s left shoulder and let him carry him to his room.