FICTION: THE SLAPJACK BY ALAN SINCIC

The Claim

Rumor had it Maggie had taken ill, taken to bed on account of GB who’d abandoned her. All of which stirred in Joe a (near to fatherly) concern. Such a burden to carry alone.

A single lantern swung from a nail above the transom, lit the empty shell of the Slapjack, confettied the porch with the shadow of a moth. Maggie’d propped the windows, the three on a side, open, so as to ferry the cool night air over the sill and into the heat of the kitchen. Over a sill (the big one, up front) she’d slung a tablecloth to dry. In the dark of the yard, the brick at the base of the hand-pump shimmered white. Joe could smell the fresh of the paint. From one end of the porch to the other, a coalition of rockers and cane-backs and flimsy wobblers rode up top of one another, locked elbows, tottered over the boy who rode the mop. Magical the hour.

Joe paused at the gate. If he’d had a brake lever to shudder the world to a stop, here would be the place. He straightened his collar and ran his hand atop (without touching) the tin sign that bore the ghost of the old Royster Feed and Seed. The word DINER, in fat red letters, obliterated the rooster logo and the cursive—like piping on a cake—Royster. He could just make out in the glow of the lantern—there beneath a coat of whitewash—a silhouette: Corn, Chemicals, Twine.

Coleman Quick Lite, said the lantern, Sunshine of the Night. From the air it pulled, ample as the air itself, a steady breath. Infinite the breath. It whispered out in equal measure light, and heat, and the earthy scent of kerosene. Coal. Peat. Iron. Such a wonder. How it could be? A wicker filament size of a thimble lights a tree or a dock or an acre of grain, lights, right up to the rafters, the whole of a barn?

So it goes. From out the acorn, the oak. From out a grifter like Maggie, a palace of griddle cakes and hashbrowns and omelets and bacon. It was Maggie broke into the

abandoned building, hauled out the rubble, scrounged up a stove and a sink and a counter and a till. She put a cot in the corner and a sign above the door: Pie. Maggie the Maker.

He rubbed at the skin on the inside of his wrist, the one and then the other, there, to warm it, where the pulse runs, the invisible charisma of blood, the trace of Russian Leather by L’ Aiglon he bought from behind the counter at the Five-and-Dime, top-of-the-line elixir framed by a cardboard print of a Cossack Horseman and the slogan Scents and Such for the Hairy-Chested.

And the hat. Hat in hand. Joe had him a weather hat for when the heaven beat the earth and a fair-weather hat for when the heaven behaved. The hats were identical in every

way. Size six and a quarter derby in midnight blue, and up in the hollow where the head goes, on a ceiling of silk at the height of the dome, an embossment in gold foil, a pair of old-timey lions, like outta Robin Hood, like outta Sherwood Forest. The hatter he pictured. Tiny man with calipers and scissors and a ball-peen hammer—he dampers with the skin of a baby deer. To the gunwale the hatter hammers a little fly of fabric so’s you don’t wear it backwards, and at a cocky angle he snaps the brim, and into the brown leather sweatband he punches the seal of the patent, Improved Cavanagh Edge 1805977.

Identical, these two hats belonging to Joe, the difference being (as in all things human) the wear. No way around it. You wear a cap to impress, but the minute you wear it, it’s a wear on the cap. When the wind bullies and the rain volleys and the sun like a sledgehammer lands, you wear the weather cap, sure—shabby-genteel the word, like the Parthenon, elegant even on the road to ruin—but when the sky clears? Ah. That’s the moment.

Which is why he never wore the fair-weather hat. He would carry it (careful not to warp the brim) in his left hand, as a token of command, and he would always, at the end of the day, or at a change in the weather, return it to the box—the wooden hatbox, the Ark of the Covenant, black and octagonal, and carved as if out of a honeycomb, and with a garnish of gold, and stamped with the logo of the Dobbs and Company, Fifth Avenue. The stamp on the box the capper: a carriage with a coachman up top, a whip and a horse and a top hat, the whole deal.

He crossed the dark yard and up the steps to the lip of the porch. On the way there he’d managed to assemble himself, a limp and a story to go with it. Portable story. When she would ask, he would shrug, and say it was nothing. No price too high to pay he’d say.

What? she’d say. What do you mean?

It’s nothing he’d say. Don’t mention it.

No – what? she’d say. What do you mean?

So then he’d have to tell her. He was a veteran, see, combat veteran, survivor of the battle of the Marne. He would look out the window. Into the distance. A harbor. Silver in the gloaming as the seed of a pumpkin, there, on the horizon, a ship. Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay they sing—the sailors, arm-in-arm with the soldiers, arm-in-arm with the cabin boys and the mess cooks and the nurses and the captain (brisk as a bonbonniere in his almondy whites and sealed with rivets of royal icing yellow as the yolk of an egg) sing, they sing as they slide off over the edge of the earth and away.

What was it like? she’d say.

The trenches, he’d say, and pause. The Hun.

She’d lay her hand on his. He’d make as if to clench the fist and then, of a sudden, pause. Through the palm of her hand, the beat of his heart would travel. Breathless. She would be breathless.

The gas, he would say. The chlorine. The phosgene. The mustard.

Think of it. Picture it. And she would. She would picture it. They would picture it together. Joe, sensitive Joe, day in and day out all sooty as a ham in the midst of that

deadly contagion and even—he would tell her in a husky voice—he was even, to this day, allergic to even so much as a whiff of mustard. He’d hint how GB’d deliberately, and with malice aforethought, seeded the ground with a tincture of Gulden’s so as to render Joe, and at the height of the duel, and for all intents and purposes, blind as a peeled potato.

Joe stepped out of the shadows and made for the door. The boy dropped the bucket and scurried away. Stick of a kid she paid a quarter a day to fetch and to carry, shadow up beside her as she tooled around town with a basket of pies or dickered with the miller or scavenged away at the landfill for the saleable loot and the fixable treasure. Sparrow, she called him. Typical woman. So scared of a man, she makes a pet of— not that Joe’d be jealous of a boy. Barefoot boy with a pocky face and shred of a shirt and—look at him run. Run from Joe. Force of personality they call it, the way Joe carried himself. How much bigger he felt in the company of smaller beings. And there was more. A feeling he would never name, even to himself, on account of, well, on account of pride. To be with a broken woman, to feel bigger on account of that. He would always be the stronger, the straighter. And the broken building —the Slap-Dash he called it—made him feel even that much bigger. Leave it to Maggie make a bronze medallion from out the petrified patty of a cow. Women. Torture a T-square to find a angle true. Women!

Wrapped in a sheet is where he found Maggie, propped on a stool, sifting through an array of seed packets. Across the broad table she fanned them out, like a hand of solitaire, into separate little kingdoms: the early bloomers, the climbers, the perennials, the bulbs. In the candlelight, the kingdoms wavered.

“So Joe. Why the limp? What gives?”

“It ain’t sympathy I’m looking for. That ain’t what I come for.”

“You’re picking the wrong day for pie.”

“I come for the baker.”

“The hell you say. What would you do with a baker?”

“Defend her honor.”

“With what?”

“My manhood.”

She pictured herself in the spring air, in the hot sun, at the center of that burst of bloom. Deployed the bulbs another ten feet closer to the base of the porch. Freed up another patch of sunlight for the perennials. The paper, stiff with the print of azalea and pepper and the red of the radish, crackled in her hand. “I seen a man before. Never seen a manhood.”

“It’s about honor, woman. My honor.”

“So now. So. I thought this was about my honor, but no. No. To defend my honor, it seems, you gotta muster a bigger, a better honor, right? Gotta bolster that mud fence with the sturdy oak of the honor of Joe?”

He limped over to the window where the moon waited. Noble the glow. A step. Two steps. There. Settled. Into a silhouette.

“That’s quite a limp, Joe—jumping like that from leg to leg, one leg to the other.”

“It’s the war, woman.”

“Hope it ain’t contagious.”

“Battle of the Marne.”

“I seen the movie.”

“You shoulda been there. We—”

“I can picture it now.”

“We—”

“You and the boys in the back of the Nickelodeon, and skipping school, and attacking a packet of Cracker Jacks with them little marzipan hands of yours.”

“No, no. We—”

“Pecker no bigger’n a button in the bole of them knickers. Peeping up at the screen—”

“I’m a veteran, Maggie. That ain’t no way to honor—”

“There you go. There you go. Honor this. Honor that. Goddammit, Joe. Every damn dish, you serving up a side of honor.”

“But it’s honor that—”

“So gimme the recipe. What’s it made of, this honor of yours?”

If he’d of had a medal, now. There’s your answer. Grand. The thing about a medal—Joe thought about the medal, this potential medal of his, with a touch of pride—you leave it to others to whisper the word of glory. The medal got a voice of its own. A ham or a shoe or a spoon? Dumb. They are what they are. They got nothing to say. But a medal.

“Illuminate me, Joe.”

It was an insult is what it was. How would she like it if he was to ask her to proclaim, out loud, what makes her a beauty? He made as if to leave. He’d been fixing to clap the hat on his head, give her a little tip of the visor, and stride out the door. Lifted his hand to—but then he remembered the weather. Reddened. As if it was owed an apology, the hat. Over to the counter he strode, so’s to have something to lean on.

“Honor’s in the doing. It’s in the deed.”

“So that clown show up under the bridge. That Dual of the Titans. You got a explanation for that?”

From his shirt pocket he pulled a smoke—Old Gold. Not a cough in a carload. Struck a match. “I got nothing to say. My deeds do the talking for me.” Joe pictured himself at the end of a bar. Dodge City. Cowboy Joe. The thumb a-tap-tap-tapping at the brass buckle with the inlay of ivory, stack of poker chips in the palm of the gun hand, the Stetson—still smokey with the dust of a thousand head of cattle—pitched up onto that set of antlers up top the barroom mirror.

Maggie broke out another pack of seeds. Summer seeds. For when the sun like a blowtorch brittles the grass and bubbles the sap in the tree. She laid them out beside the spring planting, shade to shade, sun to sun, season to season. She talked as she worked, without looking up, in a voice no bigger than a murmur.

“Lemme guess. In your head you got a picture of a person, a notion about a particular person. It’s this picture you been chasing.”

Down the length of the counter he launched a billow of smoke. “I never chase.”

“Chasing after. Sniffing the air. On the hunt.”

“You mean you,” said Joe. “Chasing after you.”

“That ain’t what I’m saying.”

“You flatter yourself, Maggie. What makes you think you’re the onlyiest flower in the field?”

“Joe, Joe, Joe. We ain’t even in the same field together. We ain’t even on the same planet together. But just for the sake of argument, let’s pluck at the ribbon of this little package you paper me in. So I’m a flower now.”

“And not the only flower.”

“But a flower.”

Sweet the way she said it. Here we go. Here the bloom. Joe smiled.

“What do you do with a flower, Joe?”

Joe loosened. Leaned his head left, right, as if to peer round the green of a thicket to find the berry within. “You lean up over. You smell it. You pluck it.”

“And what else?”

Not a man given to poetry, Joe. Tried to picture himself with a flower, jumbo flower, bud the size of a cabbage.

“What good is a flower?” said Maggie. “What do you do with a flower?”

“You… I don’t know. You—”

“You don’t know. You think you know, but you don’t know.” She tidied the seeds. Squared up the ranks with the slim edge of the arm and the hand together, like a spatula. “You got a picture of a person – a pluckable, a sweet, a breath of air—but that ain’t really a person. Not a real person.”

“Real enough for me.”

“An echo. It’s an echo," Maggie said. “I ain’t the one you on the lookout for, Joe. The one you on the lookout for is Joe.”

~

Alan Sincic is a teacher at Valencia College. His fiction has appeared in Boulevard Online, New Ohio Review, The Greensboro Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Mid-American Review, Terrain.org, Grist and elsewhere. After an MA in Lit at the University of Florida and a poetry fellowship at Columbia, he earned an MFA at Western New England University. He spent over a dozen years in NYC as a writer and performer—comic/satirical pieces that eventually became a pair of full-length plays (American Obsessions and Breaking Glass) at the Orlando International Fringe Festival. You can visit him at alansincic.com.

Want to read more? A full excerpt of The Slapjack is published in EXCERPT Magazine - No 3