The Curious Eat Themselves by John Straley

Author:John Straley [Straley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime Fiction
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2018-03-28T17:51:29+00:00

9

MY MOTHER WAS the first person to tell me the earth was round. She said it had been discovered by women waiting for their husbands to return from sea. They would stand on the balconies of their houses, waiting and watching the horizon. When the ships first appeared, the flags would seem like tiny disturbances above the shimmer of the distant line. Then the masts became apparent. Then the hulls. And they would watch all afternoon as the ships came closer and closer, rising up over the hump of the earth until they could make out the striped shirts of the sailors in the rigging. They would strain to see if their husbands were standing on the deck. They would watch and say their Christian names under their breath as each face came into focus, as the long boats were lowered, as the lines came out from the bow, the anchor let go, and the chain rattled. The women would come down from their perches to go to the harbor to learn if they were widows.

My mother loved stories, but they all had that flavor. The elements were romance, longing, and death. She smoked cigarettes and sat in the window seat in our house that overlooked the bay out the road in Juneau. I watched too. Her voice would surround me like a quilt as the smoke drifted toward the open window. The horizon was too short to see the ships emerge into view, but there were skiffs zipping by, heaving into the short chop.

Of course, by the time I was a teenager I had blown off all of her stories as romantic nonsense. I recognized that she was drinking there on the window seat and I, being no fool, knew that what she was revealing was a projection of her own unhappiness. She had been laying a trip on me and calling it truth. I vowed that I would be committed to a higher form of information than that. The earth was round, and that was that. The widows’ watch was simply a portrait of her own weakness. I was hip to her and during my adolescence I carried that dangerous secret around like a butterfly knife tucked in my boot.

I looked up at the walls of the house and walked around the backyard. The fiddlehead ferns had been thick in the flower beds and the grass on the furthest borders was tall enough to conceal a small child. I stumbled on an old horseshoe from a game we hadn’t played in years. When I picked it up, its track was scoured in a damp yellow print into the dead roots of the grass. I flipped it toward where I thought the pit had been and heard a faint clank of metal striking metal. Then I walked around to the front of the house. I let myself in and went upstairs to the master bedroom where I heard the radio playing some subdued version of a Duke Ellington tune.

She

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