William Stobb : Three very short stories...

Pop CultureArts

Jan 31

William Stobb

Officer

“Cop came by and said he had to arrest my dogs—said they’re almost too big for town and we gotta pay attention. ‘That’s what attention means,’ he said, and I remembered how I’d seen an advertisement for these implants—you know girls want bigger butts now. Right at that second I remembered the advertisement—skinny, pretty girls and then blammo they turn ‘em into girls with big butts. And I saw it on a show about people who weigh a thousand pounds or more! I don’t know if it makes sense or no sense at all. Anyway, right at that moment I thought of that for some reason and I ended up laughing a little so the officer said ‘this is funny?’ The dogs were out there sniffing around his mag light and to be honest he treated them good. You know Steve wants to chew everything but the officer just patted his head with his leather glove. Young kid officer, you know, white as a cupcake. Looked about twelve years old. And I said ‘well you bet it is, all due respect’ and I said what I thought, which is the world’s gone crazy but it’s fun in a certain way. Right then the stories were coming out about the bullet path through that Michael Brown’s head and you could see the tear gas on a satellite map of Missouri. But I always say officer okay? I never say cop because I don’t like to be disrespectful regardless of everything. We got wars and religions and cheap beer and wildfires. Seems like it’s all on fire and I suppose it is. And I figured well Beav & Steve won’t feel any pain, and maybe I’ll get a couple little dogs, little hairballs. I can’t say what he thought of me. I suppose he had a lot on his mind, but anyway he just gave the boys a scratch and said keep a close eye on ‘em, and I ended up being the one to say ‘have a nice day.’”

Shame, Hockey, Creation, Jealousy

She’s working on transforming her husband into a fashion boy—aggressive stitching on the designer jeans compliments the flopped over haircut I’ve seen on self-conscious friends of my thirteen-year-old son. We’re at a junior hockey game to watch the twenty-year-old from Alaska who’s boarding with them for the long winter season. I think she loves him a little too dearly, kind of oooing too deeply when he crushes bodies in the corners and sprays white ice stopping at the crease. He’s half her age, but... whatever.

Maybe she senses my critical eye because she says to me, “you’ve really unwound,” and it’s meant to be funny I think. I’m the funny guy who’s let the beard get gray and still wears a shredded flannel over a Slayer t-shirt like I’m the back-up bassist for Soundgarden. So I laugh, and hockey boy’s slapshot misses high and rattles the Plexiglas, oooo!

And it’s probably true I’ve shaken loose, unraveled and I do experience regret about entropy there along the boards of our old local rink. These things happen in Minnesota: mortal evasions, shameful realizations, wonderful philosophies mixed up with hockey. When I saw Marty on the Zamboni with a Charlie Brown Christmas tree riding shotgun, my throat jumped up and I choked off a sob. Guess I’m pretty much ready to dissolve.

A ribbon of steam forms in husband’s nostril and then liquefies in laughter into delicate spatter across the star-patterned collar of the club shirt she’s made him wear to a hockey game and I imagine new universes forming in spit. Tiny droplet on nasal hair, tension containing atmosphere. Loneliness and jealousy supply a myth of origin. From a concealed dimension, time emerges, adheres like morning dew. Unsuspecting gods set clockwork in motion and now a tiny man chases a final buzzer out into a night that should be colder, where no one cares about his haircut or his shirt.

Evidence Found Much Later in a Hymnal

Not too many know that Andy’s real name was Mosey. Moses Abraham Larson. Somehow he got
everyone to just call him Andy, because imagine the teasing I guess. But it comes out at the funeral and
everyone’s like, “Mosey? We didn’t even know his real name?” And this a man married for 60 years to a woman named Betty that everyone called Bonnie. What do you really even know about people? Bonnie’s been gone three years, so no answers there. Mosey hit 82 before the cancer got him. It worked slow at first and then fast at the end, which is the best cancer you can ask for I guess. Throat cancer, so no death-bed confessions or clarifications either. Over a hundred people at the country church funeral. Pretty good. Not that it’s a popularity contest, but some even flew in to Minneapolis, caught a connection to Fargo, then drove the three hours northwest on icy roads to be here this frigid January Sunday, so he must’ve done something right, whatever his name was.

Unusual things that happened:

His nephews—old men themselves—create a funeral hymn medley to sing, accompanied on piano by an ancient woman who’d been their kindergarten teacher long ago. Everyone agrees they’re not as good of singers as Andy Moses.
The community’s overall weak singing is noticeable. Mosey sang barber-shoppers, and he’s gone, so... now we’re out of tune forever.
Among the many pictures posted on tag-board was one of Mosey fishing in a mountain stream with a woman no one recognized.
The fact that he had been beloved and talented—champion ski jumper, curler, soloist at funerals and weddings—seemed more depressing than hopeful. Things just get sadder and worse.
All the pictures with Bonnie Betty involve cards. Pinochle and euchre, where he could be sly about bidding.
At the end, one distant relative stands in front of the whole church to tell the story of going to see some petroglyphs with Mosey, and how he’d been curious, and how that had seemed like the best quality. Meanwhile, everyone’s like... what’s a petroglyph, but no one asks.
Babies everywhere, and the babies are cute, but it doesn’t take a mathematical genius to project that in 2099—if those babies are lucky—they’ll be dying just the same as Mosey.
And what will funerals be like by then? What will people even believe in?

And it’s winter, so there’s no burial. “What will they do with him?” “He’ll go in the shed ‘til spring.” And so he will, but no one anticipates that he’ll be taken from the shed before spring. And who took him? Some white supremacist who won’t abide a Moses in the Christian cemetery? Rural Satanists? Meth-heads? Will he ever be found, deep in the Kootenai in Northwestern Montana, on a side road off highway one just south of the border crossing at Rykerts, where he told me he belonged.